Critical Path: repost
by Mrs S Eyre
Summary: Ivica saw her smile and in and instant his heart broke and was as instantly mended.
1. Default Chapter

Context: this follows "Reconcilable Differences" and "Strings Attached", connecting RD to its epilogue. RD was written before S9 so this is now definitely AU. There is no Eric, no second Maggie arc, Carby happened but not as it did on the show, Romano still has all his limbs and no-one went to Africa.  
  
And it's first person, Abby's POV which was a bit of a challenge because I'm very much not Abby! Oh, and the language is a little, erm, adult, at times.  
  
Look out for a companion piece to this - "Once More With Feeling" by Californiagirl" - a parallel story written from Luka's POV and highly recommended!  
  
The usual disclaimers apply.  
  
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PART 1  
  
You ever do that, look back and you can see those moments when things change, or when they don't, or when you can think "Yeah, that was good"? I never used to, never had the knack of letting myself just sink into the moment, not worrying about where it came from or what came next. I can look back and see where stuff changed, where things changed shape or direction. But the good stuff I kind of missed, waiting for the next thing to jump out at me.  
  
I have a long list of "Moments That Were Never Going Anywhere Good", I could recite it in my sleep. Moments with my Mom, with Richard, with Luka, Carter, everyone really. I remember sitting in the bathroom and waiting, except not really needing to wait because I knew, and I remember saying shit out loud I don't know how many times. And when I finished doing that I picked up the 'phone but it wasn't to call Richard. Right there was the moment, not when I looked at the little plastic wand with its pink stripe, 'cause then it could still have gone the other way. But, you know, it didn't.  
  
Sometimes things literally knock at your door, and you have the choice to open the door and let them in or shut it firmly in the face of whatever stands on your doorstep. My mother that night. Actually, I was more than half way to sinking into that moment, one of those rare times when it occurred to me that things might be OK for me. Fresh out of a warm bath, Luka cooking dinner, holding me, not wanting my thanks really but accepting them, a second or two when I let myself believe ... and then the knock at the door. I wish I could say that I made a decision to kill it all right there, but hey, I'm trying to be honest here, and I didn't. I just starved it to death, let it die of neglect. Oh, come on, you're not surprised are you? I'm an addict, stuff just happens to me, right? How sad is that?  
  
It was a long time before it happened again for us. We'd eaten dinner and were doing dishes, a nice little vignette of domestic bliss. The light was on green again, and there was me, feeling kinda proud of myself because I'd owned up and it seemed to have worked. It was one of those half dozen "Hey, I'm happy" moments in my life. There have been more since and they're starting to overtake the memories of the moments when I made the crappiest decisions in my life - call the clinic, not Richard; talk to Carter, not Luka; take the beer, take another beer; take Carter; more beer and crash Luka's place. What the hell. You know, you want to be happy and you fight and strain for it but it's not a constant state, is it? It's episodic, and the trick is to recognise it when it's there. I'd not been there enough to recognise the landscape I don't think. Not like being miserable. But there - misery, people don't expect to be miserable all the time, do they, only they don't fall down dead if they're unhappy occasionally. Not normal people. Happiness is the same - you have to be on the look out for it.  
  
Clever, huh? Well, yes, but not original. Luka's father said it to me as we sat on the stoop smoking after pizza. I just knew he'd be an extra anchovies guy. He'd said a lot to me that day. There, see - I remembered another one. I stood up to him and I forgave Luka. Just like that, let it go. I let it go instead of rolling it up and shoving it into my already over stuffed emotional backpack to haul around with me. Check me out.  
  
It was about a month later, in the dark, that I made one of those decisions that ought to have fanfares and fireworks but didn't. Two security alarms were going off and there was a noisy fight going on in the apartment upstairs. He hated this stuff, I know he did, and he was real tense when he finally stopped sighing about it and spoke up.  
  
"Should have stayed at my place."  
  
"Next time."  
  
"It's a nuisance, having two apartments. We should think about sharing." I didn't answer and he went on "I mean, we'll have to decide on one place when we're married." I still didn't say anything and this time he didn't break the silence, waiting. I found my voice eventually.  
  
"Somewhere with a garden."  
  
"You want a garden?"  
  
"Well . . . we'll need somewhere for the kids to play, won't we?"  
  
He got up then, pulled on some clothes and left the room and I waited but he didn't come back so I followed him. He was sitting at the table and he'd taken one of my cigarettes, and I sat opposite and watched as he smoked it right down.  
  
There are some things in your life that are always in the present tense, and almost everything between now and then seems like that for me. I was real confused by that at first but then I figured it out. I was there, see? I mean, really there, not missing from my own life, however much it might stink, I was right there. Ivica would be proud of me. Hell, I was proud of me - and that was pretty much a first.  
  
So anyway, I'm starting to feel a bit panicked, sitting here in the dark, and I'm cold, and still he doesn't say anything. Instead he reaches for the pack of cigarettes but I get there first and pull them out of his reach.  
  
"Luka." Nothing. "It doesn't matter, I mean, if it's not what you want, I just always thought . . . " I'm rambling and I pull myself up short because I can hear how stupid I sound. How could this be something I just "always thought"? And shit this isn't what I expected. I'm not sure what I expected - him to gaze at me through a haze of unshed tears before finally releasing them in a torrent of love and gratitude?  
  
Hell, yes.  
  
"I'm sorry." he says. "I didn't . . . I wasn't . . ." Spit it out Luka  
" . . . I didn't see this coming."  
  
"You should blame your father."  
  
"What?"  
  
"He kinda laid into me . . . about being afraid, about just going for it, taking a risk if it's something you want . . . badly enough" I finish lamely.  
  
"If it's what who wants?" and I can hear the scepticism in his voice now.  
  
"Me. Me. But - " I don't finish because he gets up and makes for the bedroom. See a pattern developing here? My legs don't feel so good but after a minute I follow and find him sitting on the end of the bed, tying his shoe laces, and he's put on a sweater.  
  
"I'm going out."  
  
"It's after one."  
  
"I need to walk."  
  
And walk he does, right past me, grabbing his coat, out the door. I know that whatever else I can do I can't follow him.  
  
An hour later I hear him come in but I don't open my eyes, I don't want to see his face. He sits cautiously on the edge of the bed and I can feel the cold coming off of him in waves, and then he's running an icy finger along my eyelashes. I can't not look at him now. The only light in the room is from the street lamp outside and I can't make out his expression.  
  
"Hey." His voice is very soft.  
  
"Hey."  
  
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have - "  
  
"It's OK. I understand."  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"It's all right. I should have talked to you properly, I just assumed . . . I never expected to want . . . but no, this is enough for me, us I mean, I probably shouldn't even - "  
  
"How many?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"Children; how many?" Jesus, this is changing direction so fast I may throw up.  
  
"Well, you know, I thought maybe we could start with one and see how that goes." He nods slowly and I know he's not looking at me. And then I know he is and that he's smiling a little.  
  
"So - you want to make a start?" 


	2. Part 2

Part 2  
  
So we make a start. We make lots of starts, because every month there's a reminder that although we may have started we aren't passing the finishing post. He isn't concerned but I've seen him look at me, anxious when I check the calendar and the test in the bathroom cabinet remains unopened.  
  
Still, we've found a house and he's working on keeping me focused on that and does the usual man thing of deferring to me on all matters of décor, except for the business with the lampshades in the bedroom where he just says no, and he makes plans for the garden which isn't big but it's big enough and hey, it's nearly spring. On the day we move in he helps me make up the bed with new sheets and he stands back and gathers up the wrapping from the new linen and throws it onto the landing, shutting the door on the mess.  
  
"So - you want to christen them?" When I don't answer he says "Abby?"  
  
"It's not - I mean, next week, we should - "  
  
"We should what? Are we fucking to a schedule now?"  
  
"Are we what?" I'm pissed because when we first decided to go for this I was all over him like a rash at every opportunity until he started to get evasive and then told me that having him ejaculate on average 6 times a day might actually be counter productive which I knew, thank you very much, although I could have lived without him saying he was starting to feel like a stud bull. I'm stunned too because Luka doesn't talk like that, at least not to me, so gee look, I guess Abby got it wrong again.  
  
"You heard me."  
  
"Look, you know the best chances of - "  
  
"I know all about making babies, but the rest of the time we're making love, aren't we? Or does that not matter any more?" I say nothing and he sighs and sits down, not looking at me. "Why are we doing this?"  
  
"Fighting?"  
  
"No."  
  
"You mean - I - you mean - "  
  
"Starting a baby is what I mean."  
  
I'm trying so hard not to actually dislike him right now because, Jesus, I knew we'd have to figure this one out but I was hoping it would come later, when it was too late to turn back, and I also know that he never sat down with Danijela and asked that question. But me, I'm the addict, see, I'm the one who didn't want kids and now I have to explain myself.  
  
"Because it's what we both want."  
  
"Why? What changed?"  
  
"Everything! Everything changed. I'm sober, I'm . . . I'm . . . I like my life, Luka, I like myself, I think I'm worth sharing now, I'm - "  
  
"You're desperate! And you're scaring me!"  
  
"No."  
  
"You are."  
  
I know what he's thinking. "I know what you're thinking."  
  
"Sure you do."  
  
"Yeah, sure I do, asshole. Abby the addict, grab, grab, grab. Jesus, Luka, my whole life is one long frigging balancing act, you know? Live in the moment but learn to defer gratification, learn from my past but put it behind me, see things - "  
  
"Abby."  
  
" - from the outside and - "  
  
"Abby, stop. I'm sorry."  
  
"I'm not desperate, Luka, I'm impatient. You do understand the difference, do you? I'm impatient because I've wasted too much of my life already, I'm impatient because I never thought I'd want this and I do. Want, Luka, want. Not need, not crave, want. I'm allowed to want, aren't I? And I'm worried. I've spent years making sure that nothing short of the Holy Ghost could get me pregnant and now it's like a fucking bad joke! Nothing."  
  
"Three months, Abby. It's no time at all."  
  
"How long before Danijela conceived?" I can't believe I just said that.  
  
"What?" He can't believe it either. For a second there I think he's going to laugh.  
  
"How long?"  
  
"Jesus, Abby, about 10 minutes I guess - is that what you want to hear?"  
  
"So why not me?"  
  
"It's too soon to talk like this, you know that."  
  
"God, I did it before without even wanting to."  
  
"And it will happen again."  
  
"What if it doesn't?" I'm trying not to cry and he finally comes to me and holds me.  
  
"It will."  
  
"What if it doesn't?"  
  
"I don't care." I'm out of his arms like a shot now. "I mean I do care. I want this too, I do want it, even if I thought I'd got past wanting it, but God, Abby, not if it means losing us."  
  
And that's it, right there. He can tell me he loves me every half hour for the rest of our lives but this, this is what he's about. He wants me and he wants me more than he wants what I thought he had before, and I know then that even if there's no baby I'll live, because there'll be us.  
  
Oh, and we christen those sheets.  
  
It's all in the mind. Right. Except, right. I don't know, I guess it was like flicking a switch, and three weeks later, while I was trying real hard not to look at the calendar he handed me the test and nodded toward the bathroom. Five minutes after that I'm sitting on the edge of the bath trying not to hyperventilate and saying "shit" over and over again, except this time I'm grinning like an idiot.  
  
"Congratulations," I say, aiming for cool and hitting Kid On Christmas Morning, "you're going to be a father." I don't add "again" although it's there, between us. He shrugs, affecting nonchalance.  
  
"I told you so" and then he's got hold of me and I'm not sure whether he's laughing or crying. I think he's laughing, and that's OK because I'm crying. After a moment we look at each other.  
  
"I'm scared." I say.  
  
"Me too."  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"I'll get over it."  
  
"Me too?"  
  
"You too. Of course," he continues, "I'll do the honourable thing."  
  
"Oh, you will?"  
  
"Sure - make an honest woman of you."  
  
"Well, that's very kind of you."  
  
"I know," he sighs "can't escape my upbringing."  
  
"And I'm grateful of course."  
  
"When?"  
  
"Soon. No fuss, no announcements, just us, you know."  
  
"Just us," and he laughs softly and we make the most of our pre-marital status upstairs.  
  
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	3. Part 3

I have no idea how to spell Abby's maiden name and I can't be bothered to look it up. So there.  
  
Anyway - a Luby wedding; hearts and flowers, big dress, white doves, red carpet, single tear. Yeah, right.  
  
Part 3  
  
For a while there it looks like Kerry might screw the whole thing up when she turns down Luka's request for leave in the same 2 weeks I've already booked. She's gone into bureau-speak now.  
  
"I appreciate that you want to vacation together Luka, but logistically it isn't always possible to accommodate personal preferences and, since Susan will be away then, your own preferences will have to be subordinate to the requirements of the rosta so - "  
  
"It's not a vacation." he says tersely. I know that tone of voice and I know that if Kerry wants a fight she'll get one.  
  
"I don't understand."  
  
"It's a honeymoon." Kerry blinks a couple of times and looks over to where I'm hovering by the door. I give her a tight little smile by way of confirmation and she nearly smiles back before nodding at him and telling him she'll see what she can do. She'd better.  
  
We buy a ring for him but I don't need one because the night I took the test he slid Rosa's from his finger and onto mine and it fitted, so I just nodded and that was that. And a couple of weeks later, with Carter and Chen as witnesses we sign on the dotted line. I've bought a little dress but I don't wear it because when I put it on I don't recognise myself. Luka shrugs and says I can wear a wet suit and snow shoes if I want and anyway it would give his dad a laugh when he sees the photographs. My hands shake when I sign my name as they did when I struggled to get the ring onto his finger, although his hands are steady on both counts. I don't know why mine shook; I've never been so sure of anything in my whole life as I am doing this and I remember the last time I had to scrub mascara from under my eyes and manage to confine myself to just a few tears. His hands might be steady but he cries a little too and rolls his eyes at his own sentimentality. Carter takes some photographs at City Hall and later at the obscenely expensive restaurant where the four of us eat lunch paid for by Carter who says it's a wedding present although Jing-Mei doesn't think it counts as they get to eat it too. I make up my mind that Luka will have champagne that night even if I can't. If ever a man deserved champagne it's him today.  
  
Carter takes me aside as we leave and looks at me sort of sad and happy all at the same time, then he rolls his eyes too and hugs me harder than he ever did when we were together. And then we go to work, me clinging to Luka's arm so that he can hardly walk, no, don't laugh at me, I do, and he looks down at me and smiles. I never felt so pretty before in my whole life as I do when he smiles at me like that.  
  
It's while Luka is examining the woman who has a 6" kitchen knife through her palm and a split second after he's told me to get a surgical consult down here that Susan reaches across the sedated patient and grabs Luka's newly un-gloved hand.  
  
"Is that a wedding ring?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"You got married?" He doesn't bother to answer that one. She looks at me and I hold up my own left hand before she can ask who the bride is.  
  
"Wow. Isn't this a little sudden?"  
  
"It was marry her or be deported" he murmurs.  
  
"Actually I only did it for the sake of my unborn child." He's shocked, wide eyed, because we agreed not to tell anyone yet but come on, this is the biggest thing I ever did and besides I'm having fun here.  
  
"You're kidding."  
  
I pick up the patient's coat and purse from the floor where they've been dropped and, leaning in real close I say to Susan "Yeah, I'm kidding. The truth is I married him for his money." I go to make the call but go back to her and whisper in her ear. "And the sex." She doesn't know what to believe. As I pick up the 'phone I hear him say to her "I think you can close your mouth now Susan."  
  
Kerry drops by to say congratulations and to ask if I've informed HR of a change of name. I hadn't even thought about that. I've been married 4 hours and I don't know what my name is. I hunt down one of the options and he's non-committal and says not to change anything on his account.  
  
"You don't want me to be Abby Kovac?"  
  
"Not particularly. You want me to be Luka Lockhart?" and he's laughing because it sounds like something out of very bad Disney feature.  
  
"God, no, it's terrible," I giggle. No, I do, I giggle.  
  
"It's a hassle, changing your name - driver's licence, bank, credit cards, HR. You could always take back your maiden name - I mean if you don't want to be Lockhart now you're married to someone else."  
  
Married to someone else; I'm married to someone else, and look who it turns out to be.  
  
"Just as much hassle."  
  
"More logical though."  
  
"I kinda like the sound of Mrs Kovac."  
  
He sighs. "Makes me think of my mother."  
  
His mother; not Danijela.  
  
"Well, hey, I get to be your mother sometimes, don't I?" He's clearly not convinced.  
  
"So - Wyczinski then? You think?"  
  
"Like I said - up to you. Whatever you feel right with." I'm vaguely disappointed but I don't let him see it.  
  
A few minutes later I've sent up written notification to HR and sent a circular around the ER. Jerry is the first to ask me why.  
  
"I got married."  
  
"To . . . " He's turning this over in his head, trying to figure out what happened to me and Luka.  
  
"To Dr Kovac."  
  
"Then . . . "  
  
"My maiden name."  
  
"That's your maiden name? And you chose it over Lockhart or Kovac? Weird."  
  
He's right. I haven't been Abby Wyczinski since I was 22 years old. I feel like I just got 11 years of my life back.  
  
As the clock inches toward midnight and the end of our shifts I take up position by the board; there's no way he's taking on anything else tonight, and if I have to I'll drag him bodily from whatever case is keeping him.  
  
We have a marriage to consummate. 


	4. Part 4

Part 4  
  
There's a bit of smut in this. A tiny bit of implicit hanky panky. Nothing graphic (I can't do graphic) and really hardly anything at all. No, really.  
  
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It's dark when we get to Split and I fall asleep in the hire car we picked up at the airport so I have no idea what time we reach Vodice. Luka hauls me out of the car and carries me into the house, lying me down and shushing me, telling me not to wake myself up. I fall asleep thinking it's strange to hear the sea in the dark and not see it and that it won't be for him but having me here will.  
  
You know how sometimes when you wake up you know you're alone? I mean, not just no-one in bed with you but no-one in the house? I knew it as soon as I opened my eyes. My shoes and jeans have been removed but my shirt and underwear are still in place, and I'm still wearing my watch. I squint at it and see that it's almost noon. What time is it in Chicago? The effort to work it out is short lived and unsuccessful. Who cares? I'm on my honeymoon.  
  
The room is simple, whitewashed, although there are a couple of Ivica's paintings on the wall. And one above the bed; it's an abstract like the others but still manages to look vaguely indecent. A slatted shutter covers the window, diffusing the sunlight. The tiled floor is cool under my feet as I open the shutter to look for the sea. It's not there; wrong side of the house, evidently, and all I see is the car, a track which I assume leads to the road and beyond that hills and greenery and the bluest sky I've ever seen in my life. Looks like we're a way out of town here. But when I make my way through the kitchen, where the door stands open, and out onto a veranda, there's the sea and it dazzles my eyes. It's beautiful.  
  
He's sitting in the shade, wearing only his jeans, barefoot, reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. He sets it down as far from him as he can reach because the smell makes me queasy.  
  
"Hey."  
  
"Hey yourself."  
  
"Sleep well?"  
  
"Like a baby. You been up long?"  
  
"Couple of hours. Went to get a newspaper, then for a swim. You hungry?"  
  
"Uh-huh" I say as I settle myself on his lap.  
  
"My father left us some - " He stops there because he can't talk while I'm kissing him. His mouth is cool and tastes of coffee and I don't care; God knows what mine must taste like. "Abby," he says as my mouth moves across his throat, which is a little salty from the sea.  
  
"What?"  
  
"You should eat something." But he's saying it without much conviction because I've slid from his lap and onto my knees, between his, and my hands are busy unfastening his jeans. I give him my wickedest grin.  
  
"I intend to."  
  
Evidently missing the point that we're newly weds and that there's nothing around for miles in any direction he protests sotto voce that this is his father's house; and can it be that he's even blushing a little? "I know, " I say, still smiling. "he'd be proud of us." There's not much talking for a while after that.  
  
At week's end we pack some stuff and drive along the coast to Dubrovnik where Ivica is staying with Damir and Tatijana in their new house and where we'll spend the weekend. I'm in a state of low level anxiety and excitement all in one. They don't know we're married, they don't know about the baby because he wanted to be there when they found out. It's starting to dawn on me how little I've known this man at my side, he's a different person here. He's at home, happy, relaxed, and I remember what Ivica said about the place being softer. He's right, it is. There's a spring in his step when we stop to fill up the car with gas and he chats to the attendant who has drifted outside to pass the time of day, wipe the windshield and, I gather, offer the use of the rest room. Luka translates for me and I get out of the car, following gas guy's pointing finger. He says something as I pass and Luka shakes his head and replies. Gas guy, although I don't understand a word of what he says, is obviously back peddling like crazy.  
  
As we drive away I ask him.  
  
"He said you were . . . that I have a pretty girlfriend."  
  
"Liar."  
  
"Well . . . sort of. I told him you're not my girlfriend but my wife." He smiles at me and I can tell that he's still getting used to the word. After a few moments he shakes his head and laughs softly, looking out over the scenery, and I know as surely as if he'd told me himself in so many words that everything he wants is right there with him in that car on the coast road to Dubrovnik.  
  
It's a pretty house but they're still living out of boxes and I'm glad because with all the chaos no-one's going to be taking too much notice of anything else, like me. Yeah, right.  
  
The noise is painful as they converge on us, Tatijana first, then Damir, the children, Magdalena's greeting brusque before she heads outside, Josip clinging to Luka's legs, Anna blushing to the roots of her hair; I take care to smile into her eyes because she's in love with my husband. Ivica is last and after he's hugged me I hand over the carton of American cigarettes we've brought for him, push my hair back from my face with my left hand and smile.  
  
"Tata". He grins, completely missing the point, but when Anna speaks to him quietly he looks from me to her and back again before reaching for my hand. He runs his index finger over the ring and nods and then walks away. I'd like to think he's gone to find a quiet spot to shed a few paternal tears; truth is he's probably lighting up and thinking of something profound to say. He doesn't know the half of it. Anna has moved over to where her mother is speaking to Luka, whispers something in her ear and Tatijana throws her arms around Luka who is compelled to let go of Josip who he has had suspended by his ankles over Damir's lap in an apparent quest for loose change. I don't know why they need loose change. Tatijana turns her attention to me, asking when and where, and God, Ivica will be pissed at being cheated out of a party and isn't it a bit sudden? I look at Luka who just looks right back and I realise that it's me who gets to tell them. So I smile and say "Shotgun wedding". They stare blankly back at me and I try again. "I'm pregnant."  
  
The silence which follows this announcement is absolute. Eventually Damir speaks to Luka in Croatian, evidently asking a question and Luka nods.  
  
"Da."  
  
Damir tips Josip off his lap and comes to me, gathering me up into his arms. These Kovac men could hug for Croatia.  
  
"Go and tell Tata."  
  
I look at Luka who nods, smiling now, before he too disappears into Damir's embrace and Josip stands on the armchair and jumps up and down on it in an attempt to join in the ruffling of his uncle's hair. Anna smiles quietly and holds the door open for me.  
  
Ivica is sitting on the back step, the inevitable cigarette between his fingers, watching Magdalena practising her handstands. She's not very good. He makes room for me and smiles.  
  
"Too much for you, all of them?"  
  
"Not at all." He offers me the pack of cigarettes and when I shake my head he raises his eyebrows.  
  
"You quit?"  
  
"Well, you know, it's not something you should do when you're pregnant." His amused smile fades and he turns from me, staring hard at I don't know what.  
  
"You planned this?"  
  
"We planned it." He nods slowly.  
  
"Well, there's my brave girl."  
  
"Aren't I?"  
  
He drapes an arm round me and pulls me in close. "You feel OK?"  
  
"I feel great. Not even been sick."  
  
"Not what I mean."  
  
"I know." I'm quiet for a while, considering my words. "It feels like . . . jumping without a parachute."  
  
Ivica shrugs. "Eh, fall's OK, it's hitting ground will kill you."  
  
"Thanks."  
  
"Worst part is making yourself jump at all I think."  
  
"Not so hard in the end. We deserve this." He rests his chin on the top of my head, his hand describing wide circles on my back.  
  
"I have to teach Josip to smoke now. I need the company."  
  
"You could quit." He gives a derisive little snort. "Guess not." We sit quietly for a few minutes and then he says, as though just remembering it,  
  
"You like Vodice?"  
  
"The town or your house?"  
  
"Both."  
  
"I love the house. The town's not what I was expecting."  
  
"No?"  
  
"Bigger, busier. I didn't expect the tourists. Nice to get back to your place."  
  
"Yes. Good place for me. It's . . . secluded, yes?" I'm not looking at him but I can hear the smile in his voice, the old roué. "You will bring baby to visit?"  
  
"I'm kinda relying on all of you for cheap European holidays. Promise you won't teach him to smoke."  
  
"Him?"  
  
"Or her, whatever."  
  
"I promise. And you won't teach him to drink." I push out of his arms now, horrified, but then I realise I walked straight into it; he's laughing, looking very like Luka and then he puts his hands either side of my face and kisses me soundly before getting up and going to Magdalena, catching her ankles at the top of the handstand, holding her poised. I know how she feels.  
  
We eat out that night, sitting outside the restaurant while Magdalena and Josip run in and out of the tables collecting the books of matches they find there and presenting them like trophies to their grandfather who promptly pockets them and has Josip - and me - transfixed as he cracks hazelnuts with his teeth. When the night gets cool Damir puts his coat round my shoulders, looking at Luka and raising a cocky eyebrow at him. Later the conversation gets a little heated as the clan Kovac fill up with wine and Ivica hits the local brandy, scented with herbs and hellish expensive. I chip in to make a point and Damir talks right over me determined to get in there first. I should be offended but I'm not because this is how they treat each other. Luka doesn't miss it and stirs his coffee, smiling to himself. Just as I'm thinking that I might actually like to be a Kovac after all he looks up at me, still smiling, and with a shrug he whispers "In laws." 


	5. Part 5

Part V  
  
After Dubrovnik we spend a couple of days in Zagreb. Ivica hands over the keys to his place saying we should make the most of it because it won't be his place for much longer and yes, Luka, Mrs Gavrilic has cleaned so you can take that look off your face.  
  
He's right, the apartment is clean and fresh and about as crazy as Ivica himself. Luka's a little flustered that we'll be sleeping in his father's bed and I tell him that the single bed he occupied when he lived there is barely big enough for him let alone the two of us. He's such a kid around his dad and it makes me want to laugh. I wonder for a moment how many furtive, feverish moments he spent on that single bed with Danijela but I can't ask. And then, holy shit, he says "Doesn't seem right . . . I mean being here with my girl in a comfortable bed. Cramped and anxious is how I remember it."  
  
"I can do cramped and anxious if that's what works for you" I smile.  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"I did a little cramped and anxious myself as a kid, I think I can remember how." Maybe even six months ago I wouldn't have been able to have this conversation but shit, Danijela must be everywhere here and it looks like he's decided to go for broke and plough straight through the memories, sink or swim. So far I think we're swimming.  
  
"Dani did it very well." Dani. Dani. He's never called her that to me before. Dani.  
  
"And always knew where to draw the line?"  
  
"Always. Not that the line wasn't, you know, a way out there . . . "  
  
I can hear the anxiety in his voice; he glances away from me often and I know he's wondering how far he can go with this, how far I can go with this. I'm willing him to understand that if he can stand it then so can I. Jesus, I don't want to have to make love in his bed to exorcise her ghost but if that's what it takes . . .  
  
"She's gone" he says and I think my heart might break for him then.  
  
"I know."  
  
And then dammit, if he doesn't go and do it again, he pitches me a curve ball and I don't see it coming. "No, I mean - gone. I can't feel her here." Tears are making my eyes sting, but he smiles at me. "No ghosts, Abby, no ghosts." I think we must be the bravest people in the world.  
  
It's beautiful, Zagreb. I don't know how he'll bear Chicago after this and I wonder how he's stood it all these years, carrying the knowledge of these places around with him. I'm starting to think like Ivica. We go to the medical school, he shows me the church where he and Danijela were married, self consciously dipping his fingers into the holy water, crossing himself, genuflecting, unable to stop himself I guess. He's from another world, a whole other world; and he tells me a story about a police horse as we walk by the river. But the attempt to contact an old friend from medical school who still works there as a surgeon stalls though when he learns that she's vacationing in Italy and I can't say I'm sorry. I'm sort of feeling all Croatia'd out.  
  
Still, in the end I don't want to go back either. Back in Vodice, out on the little boat, warm sun, cool sea breeze. I've done a little swimming and can't believe how clear the water is. I remember Carter telling me about scuba diving in Belize or someplace and it makes me smile that Luka grew up with this right on his doorstep. He's trying to coax me back into the water. He's a good swimmer, fluid, powerful. Me, I'm OK but it's a lot more fun to see him move through the water, in his element.  
  
"Nah," I say.  
  
"C'mon, why not?"  
  
"I like to watch" I smirk. Get me.  
  
But, leave we must and as we let ourselves into our own house the silence is sort of soupy and the sense of anti-climax depressing. I'm grimy and tired and out of sorts. It's like getting out of a warm bath and now I'm cold and exposed and vulnerable all of a sudden. I'm not liking it.  
  
"OK?" he asks  
  
"Yeah, I'm fine," I lie.  
  
You know I once complained to Carter that Luka couldn't read my moods? Bullshit. He read them alright, he just never pandered to them. Took me at my word. Well, that worked real well back then. Not. I know I should just tell him how I feel but right then he proves that not only can he read my moods he can just about read my mind too.  
  
"Run you a bath? Then you can get straight into bed."  
  
"It's only 5.30, Luka" I say irrelevantly  
  
"So? Come on, you're tired, why don't you just let me take care of you?"  
  
"What about you?"  
  
"I'm fine. I'm not pregnant."  
  
"You figure?"  
  
"I'm a doctor. We have ways of knowing these things, tests we can do. Trust me."  
  
And you know what? I do. 


	6. Part 6

Part VI  
  
I didn't hear him come to bed last night, but I wake up wrapped up in him. He's sound asleep and doesn't stir when I wriggle free. He obviously got busy after I fell asleep because the fridge has been stocked up, and there's laundry in the washing machine which I hang out on the washing line. I make tea and take it outside, just trying to let the minutes flow. My house, my garden, my lover - my husband - my baby.  
  
My mother.  
  
I'm going to have to call her and soon. Maybe I should just do it, make the call I never thought I'd make, right now before I've had chance to think about it too much, to start to write the script I know is already drafted somewhere in my mind. Just do it.  
  
"Oh, God, Abby, I'm sorry, sweetie, I don't mean to cry . . . "  
  
"It's OK, Mom."  
  
"I'm so happy for you, for both of you, but you know, I never thought . . . "  
  
"Me neither."  
  
"I'm going to be a grandma, a grandma, Abby!"  
  
"Sure looks that way."  
  
"Did you call Eric?"  
  
"Not yet. I'll do it tomorrow. We could use a day to just get over the travelling."  
  
"How was it? Was it good? Were they pleased?"  
  
"I don't know if pleased really does it justice. But yeah, they were happy about it". I laugh a little then. "I mean, they had about 30 seconds to get over the shock of us getting married on the sly and then . . . this."  
  
"I know how they must have felt." Ouch. " I'd love to meet them, they sound like real nice people."  
  
"They are." Ha. Ivica, nice. The thought of him and my mother together in the same room brings me out in a cold sweat.  
  
"I wish I could have been at the wedding, Abby." She can't quite keep the reproach out of her voice.  
  
"Mom, no-one was at the wedding but us and the witnesses. It wasn't that sort of wedding, you know?"  
  
"Do you have photographs? What did you wear? Did you have flowers?"  
  
"A pant suit, yes we have some pictures and Luka bought flowers for me. " He's good with flowers, my husband.  
  
"Send the pictures, you have to send the pictures." I know what she wants me to say. She wants to come and visit, to hug me, and leave smudges of lipstick on me. And on Luka. Here goes.  
  
"Well, why don't you come and visit, see the house, give Luka the mother in law talk, tell me what a cute baby I was, all that stuff."  
  
"Really? You want me to come visit?" There are tears in her voice. Shit.  
  
"Of course we do." We. I wonder if she notices that.  
  
"Oh, I'd love to, I was so hoping you'd ask." No kidding. "When would be good for you?"  
  
"Look, let me and Luka look at our schedules when we get back to work and I'll call you."  
  
"When do you go back?"  
  
"Day after tomorrow. I'll call, Mom."  
  
"Promise."  
  
"I promise. Look, I have to go."  
  
"Abby."  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"I love you." She's calm now, and serious.  
  
"I know."  
  
"You do?"  
  
"Yes. I love you too. I gotta go. I'll call."  
  
She's surprised. She's not the only one. Carter's eyebrows damned near disappear into his hair when I tell him the day before we leave for Croatia. I'm waiting for the delighted grin, the congratulations and I half expect him to go find Luka, slap him on the back and do that guy stuff, maybe for the words "You old dog" to figure in there somewhere. Doesn't happen. Instead he looks . . . sceptical.  
  
"Pregnant."  
  
"Yeah, you know, sperm, ovum, cell division, implantation. Come on, Carter, med school wasn't that long ago." I'm making with the flippant remarks but I'm feeling panicked by his reaction.  
  
"That why you got married?"  
  
"Not that it's any of your business, but no."  
  
"No?"  
  
"No. I'd have done either one without the other."  
  
"Really."  
  
"Really."  
  
"Well, I'm pleased for you."  
  
"Yeah, I can tell." I get up to go because I'm getting mad now and I want to cry and this jerk sure as hell isn't going to see me do it.  
  
"Abby"  
  
"What?" I don't turn round. He doesn't answer so now I have to turn and look at him. "What?"  
  
"I'm happy for you." I've heard that before, a long time ago; I didn't believe it then either.  
  
"No, Carter, I've seen happy and this isn't it."  
  
"It's just . I mean . we never even talked about this." He's wondering now whether it would have made a difference to us but he doesn't say it and I'm glad because I don't have an answer to that. Maybe I'm afraid that it would have. "I thought you didn't want - "  
  
"Things change, Carter. People change. I didn't used to think so, but shit, I'm the living proof. I changed."  
  
"For Luka."  
  
"No, not for Luka, asshole, for me. I thought you understood that. You know, I'd like you to be happy for me but the truth is, if you're not that's your problem, not mine. I don't need your approval but I kinda expected your support. My mistake, I guess."  
  
I don't wait for his reply. Fuck him. Ha. Been there, done that, and right there I understand what his problem is; he's jealous. Oh, not of me and Luka, that's not even an issue any more; no, I've just overtaken him in the Getting Your Shit Together Stakes. He's like the best friend who finds herself choking on your great new job, or house, or the fact that you lost 40 pounds and got the trophy boyfriend. That's the thing with best friends - they're you, sort of, and then suddenly they're not.  
  
Still, he finds me just as I'm about to leave, looking a bit sheepish and carrying a patient's effects bag.  
  
"I'm sorry," he says and he grins, and it works every time, I can't stay mad at that smile. "I still worry for you, you know. And . . . didn't see this coming, you caught me on the hop." I don't tell him that he just used Luka's exact words, although it might make him feel a little better. "If it's what you've decided you want then I am, I'm happy for you." There's a moment's pause and then he steps forward and hugs me. "Really, I am."  
  
"You are? Because you know, I was kinda hoping . . . babysitting and stuff."  
  
"I'm not that happy for you."  
  
"Jerk."  
  
"It's what the J in JT Carter stands for, I thought you knew that."  
  
"What's in the bag?"  
  
"Oh, a present for you. Thought that maybe they'd come in handy."  
  
"That's cute," I say as I look into the bag, "real cute."  
  
"I thought so."  
  
"And stolen."  
  
He shrugs. "Call it payback for years of being barfed on in the line of duty."  
  
The bag is full of emesis basins.  
  
It's a relief to have called Maggie and I can sit in the spring sunshine and watch laundry blowing in the breeze and think that the grass needs cutting. I don't want a drink, I don't want a cigarette; I want my husband to wake up and come watch laundry with me. And at this moment a kiss is planted on top of my head and he leans over my shoulder to say "Penny for your thoughts."  
  
"No thoughts."  
  
"Good." He settles himself beside me and takes my hand, long legs stretched out in front of him.  
  
"Nice isn't it?"  
  
"Not thinking?"  
  
"Clothes on the line; I never appreciated laundry before."  
  
"No?"  
  
"No. I think maybe I'm turning into my grandmother. She used to hang it out in all weathers, bring shirts and stuff in stiff with frost. Smelt so good when the iron got to it."  
  
"Simple pleasures, huh?"  
  
"Yeah." We're quiet for a moment and then he says "Maggie . . . "  
  
"I called."  
  
"You did?"  
  
"Half an hour ago."  
  
"And?"  
  
"She's coming to visit."  
  
"You OK with that?"  
  
"I invited her."  
  
"When?"  
  
"Just now."  
  
"No, when is she coming?"  
  
"I told her we'd check our schedules and get back to her."  
  
"Want me to call the hospital and see what they have lined up for us?"  
  
"No. Let it wait." I lean in close then and he drapes an arm around me. "Let it wait." 


	7. Part 7

Sixteen weeks. I think I know what I must look like, I've seen it before, so many times, this look of puzzlement as I try and read the grey and white patches in the screen. Then, like looking at one of those Magic Eye things, it's suddenly clear, I make out the spine, the curve of the skull, an arm, a profile, the busy flutter of the heart. It's fascinating but absolutely nothing to do with me. He's holding my hand, his face lit by the glow of the screen, and as I watch he tilts his head and frowns a little and I realise that he too is trying to make sense of what he's looking at. He looks at me, eyebrows raised and says, so softly that I can barely hear him "I don't know, maybe a set of hand luggage, what do you think?" The technician points out the important features, takes measurements, all looking good for dates, presses the scanner a little harder into me. The image on the screen wriggles obligingly.  
  
"Helpful little thing." she says.  
  
"My side of the family" he murmurs.  
  
"I can tell you the sex if you want to know."  
  
"We don't." I say. We talked about this; he wants to avoid certainties; I'm starting to like surprises so I agree with him.  
  
"It can help with choosing names." she says. She so wants to tell us.  
  
"Even so" he says and she nods. He takes the paper towel from her and wipes the jelly from me. As she's turned away he leans down and plants a little kiss on my belly, whispers a few words in Croatian.  
  
"That for me or . it?" I ask, amused.  
  
"For the vanity case" he grins.  
  
"Do you have any questions?" she asks and we shake our heads in unison. He's hiding a smile because he knows that I'm desperate to pee now, the full bladder I needed for the ultrasound now becoming painful. I hurriedly rearrange my clothes and he helps me down off the couch. "You'll have to excuse me" I mumble to the nurse who smiles understandingly. As I'm washing my hands in the bathroom I look at myself in the mirror over the basin. Shit. This is real. I've seen it, her, him. A person, another person. Shit. What the fuck am I doing?  
  
"You're having a baby" I tell my reflection aloud. And I'm grinning.  
  
He's taking me out tonight, anywhere I want, a movie, dinner, how about we go dancing - he can teach me to tango while I can still move, and right now he's in the shower and he's singing. He has many fine qualities, this husband of mine, but a singing voice sure as hell isn't one of them. Well, I have ways to put a stop to that. It's a dirty job but someone has to do it. I'm such a saint.  
  
Later, as we're dressing, I pull on a pair of pants.  
  
"What?" he asks, as I curse.  
  
"Goddamned things, I can't fasten them. Christ, I only bought them in January." I stop then and look at him, understanding. He's smiling a little.  
  
"I warned you about the pizzas."  
  
"Shut the hell up and find me a safety pin." But I'm kinda proud of myself. I'm pregnant, see?  
  
The Saturday before my mother comes to visit we brave the Croatian Centre. I already know that the grandmothers are as mad as hell because we cheated them out of a wedding and they've made their feelings about that very plain to Luka. They nod and smile, a couple of them wink at me, a few whose English is up to the task give me advice about what I should be eating. We don't stay long but while Luka is sitting talking to a few of the old ladies about their ailments I get roped into a game of bingo which is sort of difficult because I don't know the Croatian for any numbers past five. Seeing my confusion one of the younger women who has a two year old asleep in her arms comes to my rescue and marks the card for me. I don't win of course and I'm expecting to get up and go when the young mother, who tells me her name is Mila, suddenly plants the sleeping boy on my lap and excuses herself, saying she has to go to the bathroom. The child doesn't stir but lies in my arms, his blond head hot against my chest. He smells of chocolate, his perfect skin a little flushed, incongruously dark lashes fluttering as he dreams, and I want to cry. Did my Mom sit like this with me, watching me sleep? I don't remember seeing her like this with Eric, but I guess she must have. She must have looked at me and she never saw the screw up I am, never saw the drinking, the shitty relationships.  
  
I know for sure that Luka sat like this with his kids, I know he did. But I know it without being told because that's one thing we haven't gotten around to talking about. Danijela is one thing, but the kids . . . I look over at him but he's concentrating on one of his ladies, leaning in to speak into her ear, so I guess she's a little deaf. Mila returns and takes the little boy from me and a moment later Luka's asking me if I'm ready to go or has the bingo awakened my killer instinct. As we're leaving - and God, that takes longer than the time we've spent there - he glances down at me and asks what the damp patch on my shirt is. There's an edge to his voice and his eyes look a little wary.  
  
"Sweat."  
  
"Yours?"  
  
"No, not mine, stupid, the little boy, he was sweating like a miner."  
  
"Cute though." He says, but I can hear the effort it costs him.  
  
"What?"  
  
"You think I didn't see. You were pointed out to me. They think you're a natural."  
  
I feel ridiculously proud of that.  
  
She doesn't want picking up from the bus station, she'll get a cab, she'll be fine, don't trouble ourselves. So we don't. Except Luka is cutting up bread and he's unnaturally quiet and I feel like my throat's closed over so I can hardly swallow. We're anxious for each other and he sees through my nonchalance as I see through his. When the doorbell rings he drops the knife with a clatter and a "Shit!". We look at each other for a second. "All for one" I say and try to smile and we answer the door together.  
  
In the end she doesn't gush any more than any other grandma to be and I feel uneasy because it's like we're playing at this. I give her the tour of the house and it's sort of OK, but as we're finishing up dinner I have to go and sit in the bathroom for a few minutes and remind myself that this is good, that, like it or not, the past is the past, I can't undo it and I can't rewrite it and it brought me here. I flush the toilet for appearance's sake and try not to think of what might go wrong, because Ivica was right, I've been scared for too long.  
  
Luka is down there with her and I can hear them talking; at least he doesn't have to take her around the Art Institute. I linger a little longer than is absolutely necessary before rejoining them. Truly, revenge is a dish best eaten cold.  
  
"You didn't change your name? You're not a Kovac?"  
  
"No, I did, just not to Luka's."  
  
"Then what?"  
  
"Mine. I'm a Wyzcinski again."  
  
"Oh, Abby, sweetheart, that's so nice, I can't believe you did that!" I don't tell her that I'm seriously considering the idea of being a Kovac.  
  
"Luka's idea."  
  
"It was?" She looks at him adoringly and I'm afraid that she's going to get hold of him. She doesn't and I begin to relax. She's doing fine, she's doing great, she's just . . . somebody's mom.  
  
"What about the baby? What name will you use? You going to hyphenate?"  
  
"Kovac-Wyzcinski? That would be a bit unkind."  
  
"Maybe we should wait and see who it looks like" Luka says quietly and she doesn't hear the joke in his voice. I don't really blame her for that - it's a real skill.  
  
"You'll be there, at the birth?" He doesn't answer at first and she thinks he didn't hear and starts to repeat the question, although I don't know why because it's rhetorical, right? Well no, wrong, because he cuts in.  
  
"That's . up to Abby." My mother blinks, is silent. That's not what she was expecting. Hell, it's not what I was expecting. He looks real uncomfortable now, rakes his fingers through his hair.  
  
"You don't want to be there?" I ask.  
  
"It's your show," he says. "Being there is a . . . a - " he's struggling to find the word so I know he's dealing with more than vocabulary here, " - a privilege . not a right."  
  
"I didn't know you felt like that about it."  
  
"You didn't ask," he says and excuses himself to go and make coffee. You know, one of these days he's going to do something completely predictable. But not today. 


	8. Part 8

Part 8  
  
He knows this is coming and he's avoiding it, doing dishes, clearing them away, polishing his shoes; in the end I have to corner him and actually block his path when he makes to take out the trash.  
  
"Put it down."  
  
"I - "  
  
"Luka, put it down." He complies but he's frowning like I just threatened to cut his allowance.  
  
"What?" he says, a distinct note of panic in his voice.  
  
"You have to talk to me."  
  
"Actually no, I don't have to, I don't have to do anything."  
  
"I think you do. I'm not real good at this communication stuff myself but even I know it has to be a two way thing, you see what I'm saying?" He doesn't answer me, won't look at me; "Well then at least let me talk to you. I know I didn't ask about you being with me, but I never thought - "  
  
"No. Not now. I won't do this now."  
  
"Luka - " but he's not listening, or at least he's not hearing, because he just walks past me and up the stairs. Pointless to follow him so I sit out in the garden for an hour trying to figure out what this is about. It's more than not being asked about being there, it's something worse. The sense of stillness he's always had is gone, like he's been stirred up somewhere way down inside of him and can't settle again, and I've never seen that before. I'm starting to wonder what I've walked into here. I fall asleep with him turned resolutely away from me but I know he's wide awake. Next day he's up early and working in the garden, casts an anxious glance at my mother when she comes outside with me for breakfast, and still won't talk. She wants to go shopping for baby stuff so that's pretty much that.  
  
I have to stop her spending every cent of her savings but at least she saves the questions for later as we're walking by the lake.  
  
"Are you going to tell me what happened?"  
  
"About what?"  
  
"About last night."  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"Nothing? You didn't talk to him?"  
  
"He didn't talk to me; wouldn't talk to me." She's silent for a time.  
  
"Abby . . . I think this might be my fault."  
  
"How?"  
  
"I - last night, we were talking and he seemed fine so I didn't think I'd said anything I shouldn't have."  
  
"What did you say to him?" I have a very bad feeling about this now.  
  
"I mentioned his children."  
  
"What?" Dear God.  
  
"I only said that I know about them, that I was sorry for his loss, glad that everything's worked out."  
  
"Everything's worked out?" Jesus H. Christ. "How has everything worked out? They're still dead, mom."  
  
"The baby, I meant the baby." She can see I'm horrified.  
  
"What else did you say to him?"  
  
"That I understand how he must feel, being a mother myself. I said I knew I wouldn't have survived if it had been you and Eric." This just gets better.  
  
"You ever hear of survivor's guilt, Maggie?"  
  
"What?" I close my eyes. I can't blame her for this. Shit, there can't be many people around who'd know what to say to him; I don't know myself.  
  
"I'm so sorry, Abby." She's trying not to cry.  
  
"It's OK, mom. You couldn't know this would happen."  
  
"I should have." Damned right you should. "I should have thought about it more. It's just . . . I'm so happy for you, he seemed fine, and I couldn't go on as though I didn't know." I don't know what to say to her, except what she wants to hear, so I say it.  
  
"It's not your fault, mom. It'll be OK, he'll be OK, he just needs . a little time." Yeah, right, like maybe another 15 years.  
  
"You have to talk to him, Abby."  
  
"I think I figured that one out."  
  
"I should go. I can get a bus tonight."  
  
"Mom, no, don't do that."  
  
"Abby, you have to talk to him, you can't do what you have to do with me around." No kidding. I'm really getting tired of doing what I have to do, and I'd like someone else to take a turn. "It wasn't supposed to be like this."  
  
"I know, but . . . it is what it is."  
  
And what the fuck is that, I wonder. I'm looking at my mother but I'm hearing Ivica saying "How to deal with someone like Luka, his past - not easy." I wish he was here now, I could use reinforcements. And I could use a drink. I'm glad my mother is here because if I'm honest I don't know that this baby would be enough to stop me if I was alone. Never mind talk to Luka I need to talk to Angela, go to a meeting, but I'm trapped here.  
  
"Take me back, Abby, let me get my things together."  
  
I realise that I don't want to go home, I don't want to see him, I don't want to deal with this.  
  
"Abby? Let's go."  
  
===========================================================  
  
But he's not there. There's no note to say where he's gone, nothing. I resist the temptation to look in the closet and see if he's actually shipped out. So I take Maggie to the bus station, we make promises about Thanksgiving, pretending, pretending, and I promise to call her when we've sorted things out. If we've sorted things out. I sit in the bus station for 2 hours after she's gone and I think again about Ivica.  
  
"The place where dreams fail " he'd said.  
  
I wonder if maybe that's where he is, that he never really got away from there, even though we thought he had. Well, OK then, let's find out, because I sure as hell don't want to be there, not even with him. I'd do just about anything for him but I won't do that, not that. There was a time I'd have set up home with him there but hey, look at me, not any more.  
  
=========================================================== I'm lying in the bath when I hear him come in. I try not to hurry putting on pyjamas and making my way down the stairs. He's sitting in the lounge in the dark, nursing a glass of something.  
  
"Where have you been?"  
  
"I don't know. A bar."  
  
"You've been drinking."  
  
"Yep."  
  
"You won't find enlightenment in the bottom of a shot of Jack Daniels" I say, trying to lighten the mood.  
  
"You would know."  
  
Fuck. "You can be a mean sonofabitch when you want, can't you?" Silence. He won't even fight with me now. "I know what my mother said to you. Talk to me, Luka." He doesn't. "OK, well, here's the thing. I'm going to bed now because all of this is making me sick to my stomach and if my life's going to fall to pieces on me again I'd rather it was after a good night's sleep." Like that's going to happen - the sleep I mean; bits of my life are already lying at my feet. Now he speaks.  
  
"I don't think I can do this."  
  
Shit. I take a minute to find my voice, but even then it's broken. "Now isn't a real good time to be having second thoughts, Luka."  
  
"I thought I could just . . . I thought . . . I don't know what I thought . . . I don't know what I've dragged you into."  
  
I want to laugh and cry and beat the crap out of him. I'm standing in front of him and he puts out a hand and takes my wrist, pulling me down until I'm kneeling, gathering me to him, smothering me against his body, like he's trying to keep the cold out. There's a strand of hair lying across my mouth and nose and I hardly dare breathe because I think it will get pulled down into my throat and I'll choke. It seems a very long time before he speaks and it's hard to hear because both of my ears are covered.  
  
"It hurts, Abby, it hurts to go there again. I don't want to live that again." I don't know what to say so I say nothing. "I miss them so much I could scream. I want to touch them, just touch them. Last time I touched them they were cold. I'm afraid I'm going to hate this baby because it's living and breathing and they're not. I'm afraid that every time I look at it I'll just see what I know is waiting for it in the end. I feel like I'm drowning in this shit, and if I do I'll take you both down with me."  
  
He lets me go suddenly so that I'm nearly thrown off balance, and from where I'm left kneeling I can hear that he's throwing up, and I know it's nothing to do with the drink. Not quite trusting my legs I get up and go to where he's leaning, arms braced against the sink, and I don't know what else to do except wrap my arms around his waist, rest my head against him. Running water; he washes his face, rinses out his mouth and I don't let go.  
  
"I'm sorry" he says.  
  
"Don't be."  
  
"I just . . . I can't bear it."  
  
"You won't have to. You don't have to be there."  
  
"Fuck, I'm so afraid."  
  
"I understand." And I do; I've heard new mothers talk about a volcanic eruption of feeling, like the lid's been blown off and everything from forever comes spilling out, and I'm scared to think about what that can do to me. He's the same, but what he could let out could destroy everything in its path; maybe it already is. We just knocked the scab off of an old wound and it's still raw and bleeding underneath.  
  
"I can't be in there thinking of Danijela or of them."  
  
"You're not replacing them, Luka"  
  
"It feels like it."  
  
"Look at me." He doesn't move so I have no choice but to let go of him and stand at his side, facing him, although he keeps his head down. Even in the dark I can see he's very pale. I actually can't think of a damned thing to say because this is worse than I thought, this is as bad as it gets.  
  
"Fathers," he says, "we're just bystanders, spectators. Danijela was alone and you will be too. I couldn't help her, just watched her get through it but in the end there were the babies and it was alright. But then at the end it was the same, alone again, I've seen it, how at the end we all shrink down to a point, a little point we call ourselves, where no-one else can reach us. She was alone again, suffering again and I did nothing . . . again. And when it was all over for her there were no babies, there were two dead children, all the pain and the mess and the blood and the crying, and two dead children, like a birth turned upside down. And I'm a fucking coward, I want to run away from having that in the room with us and it will be, it will be." I'm trying hard not to panic - not to panic and not to cry, and I'm doing neither. I'm the strong one here and amongst all the filth this is dragging up that fact takes root.  
  
"If it is it is. You don't have to do anything you don't want to. But at the end of it, whatever happens, there'll be a baby, you know - their brother or sister." I want to believe this almost as much as I need him to believe it.  
  
"Oh, Christ!" he says and he starts to cry, real, wrenching sobs and I'm shocked because I've not seen this before and the pain threatens to knock me off my feet. I can't do anything but hold onto him, and it's as much to keep me upright as it is to comfort him. So I hold onto him for as long as it takes and when the sobbing gives way to a quieter misery I guide him to bed and get him to lie down and then I'm watchful until he sinks under the weight of exhaustion and he sleeps, still holding my hand. I guess Ivica was right - I get to be his mom sometimes. 


	9. Part 9

Apologies to anyone who caught this chapter before; you saw a draft which included an alternative direction for the story and which I rejected. This version is the correct one.  
  
Also – fixed the "no anonymous reviews" thing. Sorry if that put anyone off.  
  
Part 9  
  
The next few days are real hard. He's exhausted because he can't sleep; what little I can get him to eat he throws right back up, he's edgy, restless, won't talk to me now. He can't get warm but he's clammy with sweat and if I get to hold onto him I can feel that he's shaking. I have to call County and tell them that we both have the flu, we won't be in for a few days.  
  
And he's started writing, pages and pages and pages in his cramped, angular handwriting. He'll stop for as long as it takes to eat something, go ahead and vomit it neatly back up then he starts in on it again. I've asked him what he's writing and he says it's nothing. Yeah, nobody writes this much nothing. He carries the stuff around with him but this morning, when he's in the shower, I sneak a look, expecting to find "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" about 250,000 times. Might as well be; it's in Croatian, but I can make out some names. No prizes for guessing whose, and mine isn't one of them.  
  
If the days are weird the nights are – well, they're freaking me out. It's always the same. He finally falls asleep but he dreams and wakes and then he – I was going to say he makes love to me but I can't call it that. He ... has me, kisses me like it's the only thing keeping him alive, fucks me the same way. It's sure as hell not about pleasure, not for either of us, it's sort of desperate, and afterwards he cries a little and I hold him, soothe him. It doesn't cross my mind to try and stop him, to say no, it's something he has to do, I get that, although I don't know what it means.  
  
I don't know what it means.  
  
Three days in and I'm staring out of the kitchen window over the garden when I sense him behind me and turn around. The light's full on his face and Jesus, he looks like death. He's showered and shaved, his hair damp, but the weight seems to have dropped off of him and there are dark smudges under his eyes like bruises. Right now I want to call Ivica real bad, because I think maybe he's seen this before.  
  
"Hey." I try a smile which he doesn't return.  
  
"I think . . . you should go to work."  
  
"What?"  
  
"You have a 12 noon shift today. I think you should go in."  
  
"Luka – "  
  
"You need to get away from here."  
  
"I don't." I so do.  
  
"You do." He takes my hand, runs a finger over my wedding ring. "I'm fine," he says, "I'm fine." He's so far from fine it's not funny.  
  
"Talk to me."  
  
"Please, I need – please." He lets go of my hand and goes out into the garden, further away from me than he's ever been.  
  
===========================================================  
  
"Hey, you're back!"  
  
"Sure looks that way."  
  
"All better?"  
  
"Better?"  
  
"The 'flu."  
  
"Oh, yeah, all better." Carter glances up at the board.  
  
"No Luka?" No Luka nowhere, no how. "He OK?" he asks. When I don't answer he persists. "Abby?"  
  
"You have a minute?"  
  
"What is it?"  
  
"Nothing." I can't tell him. Not him.  
  
In the end I tell Kerry I have an OB appointment and fetch up on Angela's doorstep.  
  
"Hello, stranger" she drawls, and I can't miss the edge in her voice.  
  
"I've been kinda busy," I say, lamely, "new house, honeymoon, baby stuff."  
  
"Uh huh." She makes tea and picks up her knitting. The click clack of the needles is sort of soothing which is weird because when Maggie knits I want to stab her with the goddamned things. Her grossly fat cat sits about two feet away from me; he's an ugly sonofabitch about the size of a Fiat, and he's staring at me with pure spite. I guess I'm sitting in his spot.  
  
"This is . . . not really about me."  
  
"No?"  
  
"No, it's Luka."  
  
"He cheating on you?" I actually laugh at that.  
  
"I wish."  
  
"Tell me?"  
  
I sip at my tea and I tell her everything, all of it, what my mother said to him, the sickness, the restlessness, insomnia, the sweats, the shaking, the writing, the endless writing. She listens, patiently, only she seems to breathe a little faster sometimes.  
  
"He's sick, Angela, I mean – sick. I think it's like he said, he's drowning in it, he's just letting himself go under."  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"What?" She's rooting around in her bag for another ball of yarn and makes me wait for her answer.  
  
"I'm thinking – disturbed sleep, shakes, sweats, throwing up – remind you of anything?"  
  
"Like what?"  
  
"Withdrawal, detox . . . whatever. You've seen it." Seen it, I've done it.  
  
"He's not been on anything."  
  
"Same process. I mean, especially the writing. Sounds like he's . . . purging himself."  
  
I'm still not getting this. "He's been fine, we talked about all this, about Danijella."  
  
"It's not about her, though, is it? It's the kids. Look, remember when you were first sober, first time you sat in a bar and watched other people drink?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
"Sure. And it felt . . . ?"  
  
"Scary," I can do this, I've worked my steps, I've shared, I can do this. "and lonely."  
  
"Maybe that's what's happened. I mean, he had to have gotten used to not being a father, right? He's past it, it's OK, he's sitting in that bar watching everyone else drinking, and now this, like someone holding a glass of tequila under your nose. This baby – it's the tequila maybe. You figured he got past that. I guess he figured that too, but maybe he didn't. Maybe he never really . . . weaned himself off of them and now he has to."  
  
"I see." I do.  
  
"You had to stop being the gal with a glass in her hand; he has to stop being the guy with a dead wife and kids and be the guy with the wife and kids alive and well and driving him crazy. Only you had AA, rehab, me. He's had nothing."  
  
When she talks about it like that it makes sense, of course it does, and I should know what to do about it but shit, this is virtual cold turkey and it's creeping me out and I don't know how to handle it at all.  
  
"He has me."  
  
"Uh huh."  
  
"What do I do?"  
  
She shakes her head. "I don't know. Maybe nothing. Leave him to it."  
  
"I can't do that. I don't know what will come out the other side."  
  
"There you go, you're on the outside of it now. And you have to think about yourself, about that baby."  
  
"Can I do that?"  
  
"I think you have to. Be there when it's over. Have a plan for however it turns out – good or bad. Protect yourself. You can't let this take you down too."  
  
Good or bad. I feel sick suddenly. Good or bad, bad or worse, worse or worst. Me and a kid with no dad maybe, and Luka, God help him, spending the rest of his dream life stepping over old brown dogs and going nowhere with only his dead kids for company.  
  
===========================================================  
  
The house is quiet when I get back; there are a couple of dishes in the sink so maybe he ate something.  
  
He only wakes up once and I think I know what's coming next but it doesn't, he just holds my hand and goes back to sleep. I lie awake for an hour, waiting, but he's still and I let myself sleep too.  
  
It takes me a while to figure out that there's something strange about the garden. I take my tea and walk down to where he's been working what we figured was an old vegetable patch. He's been digging and digging, cleared the ground and there they are, two little trees, slender little things, planted, staked and tagged – a cherry and a sweet almond. I think the almond is for Jasna, and Marko will be the little cherry.  
  
Miraculously he's still sleeping when I leave for my 10.00 O'clock shift and I'm trying not to be hopeful because, well, hope doesn't feel like a real safe place right now.  
  
I make it to a meeting before work but I can't bring myself to stand up and in the end I'm glad to leave, to get to County to work, not to think. Kerry asks about Luka and I tell her he's going to need a few more days, this 'flu's hit him really bad. No kidding. She's pissed; she's pissed because her rosta's screwed and I figure Luka's going to be looking at a lot of night shifts when he gets back. If he gets back.  
  
I hate going home, not knowing what I'll find; I wish I had a little apartment I could go to and shut the door, turn on the TV, forget about all this. I realise I haven't spoken to him in two days, haven't even really seen him. What if I never see him again? I'd have to, wouldn't I, I mean if it's all going to end there'd be lawyers because of the house, all our stuff, the baby . . . . Christ.  
  
The house is dark again and there's a weird smell which I can't place at first, but then I realise what it is. Upstairs the door to the little room next to ours, the one we said we'd use as the nursery, is open and it's cold because the windows are open too. Paint, the smell is paint. The walls are painted in the pale green he hated but I said I wanted and there's a roll of carpet in there too. I'm still processing this when there's movement behind me and he's there in the doorway in his oldest jeans, a tee shirt smudged with the same green, little flecks of it in his hair, barefoot.  
  
"Hey," he says, his voice very quiet like someone who hasn't spoken in a long time and has almost forgotten how. I've heard that voice before with patients who have been intubated, the desire to speak and the inability to make that whole voice thing work.  
  
"Hey. You've been busy."  
  
He nods. "Coming to bed?"  
  
"Sure. I'll just . . . I'll clean clean my teeth and - " there's this scary trembling going on inside me but my legs are steady as I make for the bathroom. He catches my hand.  
  
"Leave it."  
  
I leave it. 


	10. Note to chapter 9

Note for chapter 9  
  
I'm sorry but I posted the wrong document; this was a cut and paste draft of a couple of ideas, one involving Carter and a worry about a suicide attempt. I rejected it on the grounds that it was too dramatic; what I want to convey is the grinding tedium of dealing with a situation like this, not make room for drama.  
  
I've reposted the chapter now as it should be; sorry if this has caused confusion (hangs head in embarrassment). 


	11. Part 10

Part 10  
  
I can hear the birds singing. I'm not real comfortable and I realise that it's because I'm still wearing everything but my shoes. I could think of any number of mornings when I've woken up like this, hungover as shit, but instead it takes me back to Rosa's apartment. It seems like about a hundred years ago, another life. I guess it was another life.  
  
I open my eyes and look straight into his. His hair is damp and he smells of soap and toothpaste. I wonder what I smell like.  
  
"You look like Jasna when you're sleeping." I try a smile but I don't think it works. Or maybe it does because he smiles back. "When Danijela was carrying Marko I thought I could never love him the way I loved Jasna."  
  
"But you did."  
  
"Yes."  
  
"You will again."  
  
"Yes. I think maybe I need . . . a little help." No kidding. "I think I can get through all this because . . . I want to get through it. I thought I had. I mean, Danijela, I can talk about her I can think about her now but my . . . our children . . . " His voice fades to nothing but I know better than to say anything right now. It crosses my mind that my skin will be covered in crease marks from my clothes; where did that come from? "I got used to the idea that there would be no more children, not for me, and it was OK because there was you and you were enough. And then this and all the things I thought I'd put aside . . . I didn't think I'd have this again. But it's different, it's you, not Dani, and this baby will be someone else, not one of them. I know that, Abby, I know that, and if it hurts it's better than feeling nothing at all. You have to believe that. Whatever else I get wrong you have to believe me that this is about us, no-one else."  
  
"I believe you." He doesn't look convinced. "I do. I don't know where you've been these last few days but . . . I'm glad you're back."  
  
And then he starts to talk, stories about Jasna and Marko, about how she'd climb into bed with them too early in the day, not to be put off and it's like she's here with us, she's an idea, a scent, a little giggle; and Marko, fighting her for space, the time he peed on his mother's pillow and Jasna squealed her disgust so hard she made her little brother cry, how he'd sleep face down on his father's chest, the little patch of sweat he'd leave behind, and I remember Mila's little boy then and understand the look in his eyes a little better. There comes a point when he stops smiling.  
  
"But then this, all this, it's just the beginning. I don't want to be one of those crazy parents who won't let their kids out of their sight. Because, you know, I know it doesn't work, I know that." I think of Ivica again; what every parent feels most – fear.  
  
"I'll stop you if you'll stop me" I offer. He's silent for a long moment.  
  
"Deal".  
  
He's looking at me now like the Secret of the Ages is there in my face. Hell, maybe it is.  
  
"I'm sorry" he says, softly.  
  
"No."  
  
"I didn't mean . . . I didn't want to shut you out."  
  
"I guess some things we can't share. It's the way it is. But, you know - we have everything else." His hands are on my face and he kisses me, on and on until I think I might drown in him and I want his hands to move over me but they don't until I pull away from him and say "Please." He undresses me but won't let me touch him, won't let me do anything and in the end I give up what's a pretty unequal fight and go with it, his hands, his mouth, the sound of the birds, of my breathing, of whatever it is he's saying to me in Croatian, wiping out the memory of the last few nights, pretty much of every other man I've ever shared a bed with, and the words that spill out of me make me hope that Jasna isn't still around here listening. Only when I've come does he undress and I pull him into me, eyes wide open, searching his face, watching as his eyes lose focus and I know that he's seeing me and only me and my God, that pushes me clean over the edge again. In the quiet, as our breathing slows, his breath hot on my neck, the sweat cold on my body, I can still hear the birds and it's one of those moments when I could almost believe that there's a God.  
  
For the next couple of days he's like a convalescent, a little fragile, a little needy. But he's eating and sleeping again and when finally he shrugs me off and tells me to stop fussing and have I taken my vitamins I have to turn away so he won't see me smile and mentally punch the air in victory.  
  
Look, I'm not dumb, I know it's not solved, it will never be solved, there'll always be times when he'll have that look in his eyes but Christ, he's strong, this man of mine, he's like the best insurance policy I could have, makes me feel the safest I've ever felt, like there's nothing I can't do, nothing at all. How about that.  
  
And then something weird happens. He'll be going back to work tomorrow and yes, he's landed two straight weeks of night shifts and we'll barely see each other. I should be sad but I'm not, I'm angry, mad as hell and not with Weaver, either – with him. I'm surprised and scared and I don't know what to do with it. So yeah, I do what I always do, I cold shoulder him, freeze him out. He makes a couple of attempts to talk to me, to look me in the face but as we finish dinner I just get up and take the dishes away, leaving him at the table with an "OK, we have a situation here" look on his face. I load the dishwasher and tell him I'm going to bed, and, hell, I'm relieved and disappointed when he doesn't try to stop me. He never did like this game. Why do I do this, why don't I just tell him what's on my mind? I've 12 stepped enough to know what I have to do. Truth is I don't know why I'm feeling like this, I have no idea and oh, great, now I'm going to have to think about it. But I don't because I can't bear to think any more about anything. Let somebody else take a turn.  
  
He comes to bed about an hour later and I make like I'm asleep. I feel his hand on my hair and hear a quiet "goodnight" and I'm left to my own devices. By the time I turn to him and reach for his hand he's asleep.  
  
As I'm cleaning my teeth the next morning I glance up into the mirror and see him behind me, leaning in the doorway, watching.  
  
"Are you going to tell me what this is about?"  
  
"What what is about?" Jeez, Abby.  
  
"Why you're angry."  
  
"I'm not angry." Better and better.  
  
"Liar." I throw my toothbrush into the basin with such force that it bounces right back out and onto the floor which is kind of funny but I'm not laughing and neither is he.  
  
"OK - Weaver's making you pay for being MIA but guess what, I'm paying too!"  
  
"You're mad about my schedule?"  
  
"You bet!" Oh, please, even I can hear how fucking pathetic that is. "No ... no." The wind's out of my sails suddenly and if I'm not careful I'll cry. "You scared the shit out of me, Luka!" He considers this for a moment.  
  
"I scared the shit out of myself".  
  
Well the puke at least, I want to snark but hey, even I'm not that dumb. I'm on dangerous ground here and I know it. There are a lot of people who have paid for my fuck-ups one way or another and one of them is standing right in front of me, frowning a little. I realise that if the next words out of his mouth include "sorry" we're screwed, like really screwed.  
  
In fact he says "I didn't mean to scare you. I didn't mean for any of it to happen at all, but it did, and here we still are. I thought . . . you understood. Maybe I didn't explain so well." He's not going to play the game, he's not going to apologise and he's not going to pretend. Which leaves me nowhere to go but to the truth.  
  
"You did."  
  
"Then . . .  
  
"I should be happy that you're OK, on the way to being OK, because God knows I wasn't sure you were ever coming out the other side of this and I am happy, I am, and relieved and all those things, but God, Luka, I didn't see it coming – " he gives a little "me neither" smile but says nothing " - I was thinking it was all going to be over, and, and - you know when you see parents when they've lost their kids in the mall and then they get them back and they yell at them and do that thing when they get them by the arm and shake them? I want to shake you. I should be glad but, shit, all I feel is . . . exhausted and numb."  
  
"And mad as hell."  
  
"Not even close, and now I feel bad for feeling like this because I know I shouldn't and I want to blame you for that too, and you know what, I do."  
  
He nearly smiles. "Go with it. I guess I'd be mad if someone dragged me through all of this."  
  
Shit. "Someone did."  
  
"Marriage, huh?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"For better or for worse can be a bitch."  
  
See, now that was smooth, that was one smooth change of gear. I'm starting to feel my way through this.  
  
"You mean all that sickness and health stuff?"  
  
"That stuff."  
  
"This is what that means? You think?"  
  
"I guess."  
  
"Oh, great." I say and roll my eyes.  
  
"I owe you." He says with a little smile.  
  
"Yeah, you so do" I say with a nearly smile back, although, thinking about the other morning I think that may be pushing it and that anyway in the who owes what to who stakes he may just have the edge over me.  
  
"Name your terms".  
  
"I'll give it some thought." He nods. My heart's slowed down and I'm feeling a little odd, light headed. Irrelevantly I wonder if Kerry will notice how thin he's got and cut him some slack today.  
  
"I can tell Kerry you have something to say to her about her staffing arrangements ..." and there's a real smile there now.  
  
"Maybe not."  
  
"You're sure?"  
  
"I might be mad but I'm not stupid."  
  
He nods. "Abby?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"Mirror."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Mirror." I turn around and see that I've conducted this whole conversation with toothpaste foam around my mouth.  
  
"Jesus, I knew I was mad but I didn't know I was foaming."  
  
"You're beautiful when you're . . . rabid" he says and leaves before I can hurt him.  
  
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger. No shit, Sherlock. 


	12. Part 11

Part 11  
  
Two days later and I'm drinking tea in the lounge – and that's a weird thing; the smell of chamomile tea always made me sick before but I can't get enough of the stuff now – go figure – when it happens. He's not on until tonight so I grab the 'phone and curse him out when he doesn't pick up right away and then I feel guilty when I remember he'll be sleeping. Damn.  
  
"You OK?" I can hear the sleep in his voice. Double damn.  
  
"I felt it."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I felt it move." He doesn't answer. "Luka?"  
  
"I heard." Another silence. Oh, crap. And then "Butterflies, huh?"  
  
Thank God. "More like wind".  
  
"Maybe it was wind."  
  
"It was not wind. I felt it."  
  
"So, do you think maybe you're pregnant or something?"  
  
"I think maybe so. Or something. I wish you were here."  
  
"I could come over."  
  
"And do what?"  
  
"I don't know. Watch you giggle?"  
  
"I didn't giggle."  
  
"No?"  
  
"Well, maybe a little. I'm not much of a giggler, Luka."  
  
"Sure you are. You just need practice."  
  
"Look, why don't you get here early and we can get some dinner over the street."  
  
"What, you don't love me any more?"  
  
"Enough to go over there with you."  
  
"Think what dietary habits that child will be born with."  
  
"Yeah, but a resistance to salmonella too."  
  
"And a taste for chamomile tea."  
  
See, it's strange how you get used to stuff. Before long I'm taking that wriggling for granted and not long after that I'm starting to resent it, the little shoves and knocks on my permanently full bladder and, by Thanksgiving, when it starts in with the hiccups, I can curse it. How weird is that?  
  
So anyway, you remember me and my mom said we'd do Thanksgiving? She doesn't forget. This time he goes to pick her up at the 'bus station and by the time they get back they're laughing together although I was starting to wonder what had happened to them because it does not take two hours to make that trip. She stares open mouthed at the size of me; what was she expecting, I wonder? She can't get hold of me to hug me so she does it from behind, nuzzling my hair, which is kind of sweet. Junior squirms obligingly and visibly and she looks like she might cry, but she doesn't, not right now anyhow. Instead she excuses herself saying she has to freshen up. By which she means cry in the bathroom. I turn to Luka, eyebrows raised.  
  
"What?" he asks.  
  
"You tell me."  
  
"She wanted to buy me coffee."  
  
"For two hours?"  
  
"And to apologise. Jesus, Abby, she could apologise for a living."  
  
"She's had a lot of practice."  
  
"And it's understandable because, you know, she loves me very much."  
  
"Of course."  
  
"But you can stop her, right? I mean - there's a limit."  
  
"You reached it?"  
  
"About an hour ago."  
  
"She bring a pie?"  
  
"She brought two."  
  
"Like I'm not fat enough."  
  
"I'll eat them, get fat in sympathy."  
  
"See, that is so not the right answer."  
  
"It's not all she brought."  
  
"What else?"  
  
"All the stuff she bought last time she was here? We have the same over again. Knitted."  
  
This is bad news. The Grandmothers at the centre have been at it too. This kid's going to have 27 grandmas and Maggie is about 15 of them all on her own.  
  
Maggie and me in the same kitchen being a recipe for disaster, she and Luka fix dinner together while I fiddle with silverware and candlesticks and the flowers she brought and then sit and contemplate my ankles which look as though I'm wearing water wings around them. Thanksgiving my ass. Which is another worry. I still have trouble recognising my body on the rare occasions that I look at it properly. Luka assures me that I'm a picture of ripe allure but I have a hard time buying it. Oh, and that libido thing I mentioned? No longer all it's cracked up to be. I mean, I think about it, I think about it a lot but that's about as far as I go because it seems such a hassle and we seem to take longer figuring out how to do it without me being uncomfortable or needing to pee yet again than actually, you know, doing it.  
  
Sex is like eating, you know? Sometimes you want the works, 5 courses, the good crystal, fine wine, candlelight; other times you want pretty standard fare to keep you going and sometimes you just want to snack. Luka's not much of a snacker; seems he'd rather go hungry.  
  
It's not doing his temper any good, abstinence. Dieting. Whatever. A couple of nights ago I'm getting pretty unmistakable messages that his appetite has been piqued and I sigh and say okay and he tells me not to do him any favours. I'm trying to work past the temptation to say he's such a guy, thinking with something other than his brain and I smile archly, flex my fingers and say there are still things I can do for him but he says no thanks, if that was what he wanted he'd take care of it himself and he's going downstairs to watch James Bond. "Oh, go fuck yourself" I say under my breath, except not far enough under because he calls back that if he could do that we wouldn't be having this conversation, and I throw my head back and roar with laughter. He relents then and seems happy enough to lie with me while I do the crossword in the paper and he does his level best with Henry James and a dictionary.  
  
Dinner's good and he looks all offended that I'm surprised.  
  
"I'm just glad it wasn't something with the head still on" I say.  
  
"It didn't have one. Shame, I could have made a centrepiece out of it." He would too. Maggie's OK, she's telling us about her new job, how it's perfect for her, how she gets a few commissions for her art, how she's decorating her apartment and Luka would have come in very useful what with being so tall. He chats back, says he has enough paint in his hair already thank you very much and I'm actually enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner for the first time in pretty much forever. He seems comfortable, flirts with her a little so that she actually blushes, but when I get up to make coffee he's hard on my heels.  
  
"Don't leave me alone with her" he pleads and I'm a little panicked, remembering what happened last time, but he finishes with "She'll start apologising again and I might just lose it."  
  
"Come on, Luka, be a man."  
  
"What? I should go and talk to her about football?"  
  
"Worth a try."  
  
"I don't know anything about football."  
  
"Fake it. She'll never know, she knows less about football than you do."  
  
"How is that possible?"  
  
"Hard to grasp, I know."  
  
"What's going on in here?" She's followed us, she's actually followed us.  
  
"Guy talk" Luka tells her.  
  
"I can be one of the guys can't I, Abby?" Boy, can she ever. She makes to hitch herself up onto the counter but she can't do it because she's so short or too full of turkey and pumpkin, I don't know. Luka hesitates for a moment and then lifts her up and backs off a little too fast.  
  
"I know what I wanted to ask you! Names – have you thought about names?"  
  
"No, we – "he starts but I cut in.  
  
"Daniel for a boy" and I'm aware that he's frozen. "For Danijela."  
  
"Danijela?"  
  
"Luka's late wife." There is a moment's complete silence which she breaks.  
  
"Well, I think that's a beautiful idea."  
  
"Abby – "  
  
"My terms." I tell him.  
  
"Terms?" Maggie's puzzled. He's not. He's almost smiling.  
  
"And if it's a girl?" he asks, "You have that figured out too?" The way he's looking at me it's cruel that Maggie's here because I think I could go five courses right about now.  
  
"Sure. Rosa."  
  
"Oh, I like that, that's pretty!" she says, dreamily.  
  
"Isn't it?" I say, still holding his gaze.  
  
"Just Rosa?" she asks, disingenuously.  
  
"Rosa Margaret" he supplies.  
  
"Oh, no, I didn't mean – " Yeah, right.  
  
"Rosa Margaret" I confirm. And then I add "Kovac".  
  
"That part of your terms too?"  
  
"Absolutely."  
  
"Well," Maggie chimes, "I guess we have a lot to be thankful for this year." I should want to push her off the counter for that cliché but you know what, I have to agree with her.  
  
Later I wait until I'm sure he's on the verge of sleep and won't give me an argument before I speak.  
  
"Luka?"  
  
"What?" He's barely awake. Perfect.  
  
"I've been thinking . . . would you mind very much if I took your name?" I can almost hear him smiling in the dark.  
  
"What's mine is yours. Help yourself."  
  
And right there I ignore the fact that he was almost asleep and help myself to a little more than his name. 


	13. Part 12

Part 12  
  
3.00 am and I'm hauling myself out of bed, fingers cautiously exploring the contents of the cupboard in our bathroom. It's a ritual – I know that at 4.00 a.m. I'll need to pee and an hour before that – heartburn. My own fault this time I guess. Turkey and pumpkin pie, I don't know what I was thinking. Dammit, the bottle I need isn't here and I have to grope my way across the landing to the other bathroom, and I'm cold and tired and Luka doesn't even stir.  
  
I've given up measuring this stuff out and slug it straight from the bottle. I'm wide awake now and so is the baby. Closing the bathroom cabinet I damn near give birth on the spot as Maggie's face stares back at me from the mirror.  
  
"Holy shit, you scared me!"  
  
"I'm sorry. I heard you, wondered if everything was OK."  
  
"Good job it wasn't Luka in here."  
  
"I know your footsteps."  
  
"You do?"  
  
"I'm your mother, Abby." I nod at that, and wonder if one day I'll be able to pick this child's footsteps out from anyone else's.  
  
"Couldn't sleep?"  
  
"No." she says, scrubbing at her face and she looks suddenly old in the bathroom light.  
  
"You want some tea or something?"  
  
"That would be nice."  
  
The kitchen smells of Thanksgiving cooking. My mother makes the tea, wrinkling her nose at the smell of the camomile, while I shred a napkin into tiny pieces.  
  
"I guess I'd better get used to this," I tell her as she sits down.  
  
"Used to what?"  
  
"Up all hours, nursing."  
  
"Luka sleeping?"  
  
"Like a baby."  
  
"God, that's such a silly expression."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Sleeping like a baby."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"He doesn't wake up every three hours screaming, does he?"  
  
"Not any more." I can see in her eyes that right there she gets it. She nods, waits. "After you left . . . before, he – we – had a rough time of it."  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"Don't be. Had to happen some time."  
  
"But – "  
  
"No, mom, it's good, it's all good. I got through it with him, I was there for him this time, you know? And I didn't fall to pieces. I think I really understood. Like, it was always there, and I knew, I did know, but . . . I didn't feel it"  
  
"You do now?"  
  
"Yeah. I knew I loved him, decided on this baby, married him, made those promises, but I feel like then, those few days, that's when I really married him, took on the whole shitty mess of his life. I don't think I could let it go now."  
  
"I don't know that I'd want to feel all that. You're a brave woman." I can laugh at that.  
  
"Tell me about it."  
  
"And he's brave man."  
  
"I know – he gets me."  
  
"And lucky – to have you." There was a time when I'd have sneered at that. Not now. "It won't be easy," she continues, "ever."  
  
"When is it ever? But I figure he's worth it."  
  
"And you're worth it." Hell, we just had ourselves a L'Oreal moment.  
  
"I'd better be." She laughs then.  
  
"I wish . . . I wish I could have been more like you."  
  
"You were." Jesus, do we have to go over this?  
  
"I tried."  
  
"You were sick, mom."  
  
"I still am. I'd understand if you didn't want me anywhere near this baby."  
  
"Mom – "  
  
"I'll always be sick, you'll always be wondering whether the Crazy Woman is going to show up. But the thing is I'm still here. Life has a way of holding onto you, of pouring charcoal down your throat and bringing you back. And I'm glad I'm still here. I'm glad to see this. Do you remember – "  
  
"What?"  
  
"Before, that time before, when I said risk is all there is or we miss out on the good stuff?"  
  
"I remember."  
  
"What changed your mind?"  
  
"About Luka? He did. About this baby? I don't know. I think maybe Ivica."  
  
"Luka's dad?"  
  
"You know any other Ivicas?"  
  
"What did he say?"  
  
Oh boy. "Same as you I guess only with a few profanities thrown in. He wasn't so nice about it. Cried though, in the end."  
  
"The same as me?"  
  
"He said – he said I was afraid of being afraid."  
  
"Same as me." She's pissed.  
  
"It's not a contest, mom. Maybe I just needed to hear it again." Not to mention taking her word for things not coming real naturally to me. No, I won't mention that.  
  
"Well . . . I'm glad that you took the risk, because it's worth it, Abby, it's so worth it when that baby's born."  
  
"Can I ask you something? What's the feeling that parents feel the most?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"What do you feel?" She considers for a moment.  
  
"I don't know what you want me to tell you."  
  
"The truth will do."  
  
She nods. "The truth? I was scared, scared as all hell, always scared, all the time. Even now."  
  
"That's what Ivica said."  
  
"So why ask me?"  
  
"Ivica's a little . . . odd, sometimes. Most of the time."  
  
"What and you thought you'd double check with the normal parent?" I can laugh at that too. "And how about you?"  
  
"Me?"  
  
"How are you . . . "  
  
"Feeling? Scared. Excited. I . . . I mean I've seen what happens when the worst happens, seen it in Luka, what it's cost him to let it go." I think for a moment before going on. "Before . . . when – if – I thought about kids, about having them, I always sort of saw myself on my own, you know? I don't think I ever saw a father around. Which is weird, because there'd have to be one, right? Except maybe not so weird. I mean, dad left, didn't he? Still, with Richard I couldn't do it. I was still thinking like it was just me. And it was."  
  
"You didn't trust him."  
  
"What? No, that wasn't it. I didn't trust myself. I wasn't ... mom material. Whatever that is."  
  
"I . . . I don't suppose I was a real good role model."  
  
"It's not that."  
  
"Sure it is."  
  
"Doesn't matter any more. What's the point in dragging through it? It happened. Life's shit sometimes. I'm still here, right? I'm scared as all hell but I'm doing this and in a couple of months time I'll be a mom, Luka will be a dad again and I won't have time to pick over the entrails of what was or what might have been. I don't want to do it. Life's short, Mom. Look at Luka. If anyone should be scared shitless here it's him, and he was. But he's going with it, taking the risk because he knows it's worth it. I have to believe him. I do believe him. Shit happens. It's not our fault and it stinks. But what are you going to do about it? Stay home and wait for perfection to show up? It doesn't show up, it never shows up and God knows, we're a long time dead. I'm going to be afraid for the rest of my life now, I know that. But I'm not afraid of being afraid anymore. I don't have the time."  
  
She's staring at me like she she's seeing me for the first time. Maybe she is. And I'm kinda surprised myself; throw in an accent and I'm Ivica, right? Finally she smiles a little.  
  
"Still here, Abby. You're still here."  
  
"Still here."  
  
"And happy?"  
  
"Happy? Who knows? It's a knack, being happy, I have to keep working on it, I forget how to do it sometimes. But I can recognise happy when it happens better. I'm happy more often than . . . I'm not. Does that count?"  
  
"It's more than a lot of people ever get to say." We look at each other for a moment and I break the silence with "I'm cold. I should get back to bed." A nod.  
  
"Abby – Happy Thanksgiving."  
  
"Not any more."  
  
"What?"  
  
"It's 4.00 am, Thanksgiving was yesterday."  
  
"Abby – Thanksgiving isn't a date – it's a state of mind."  
  
Jesus Christ, is she working for Hallmark now? I have no idea what to say to that piece of crap and I'm pretty sure I have a "WTF" look on my face. In the end she can't keep it up, her lips twitch and she lets out a snort of laughter, slapping her hand on the table, sending the scraps of shredded napkin flying like a little flurry of snow. "I got you, I so, so got you!" She doesn't look so old any more. 


	14. Part 13

PART 13  
  
She stays another couple of days after Thanksgiving, my mom, and it's OK except that she keeps trying to make herself useful and I can't find anything in the kitchen because she puts everything in the wrong place. She even gets Luka to come along to see what we can get in the sales, which is how I find myself seriously considering the huge, old fashioned baby carriage on its gigantic wheels. When I point out that we'll still need something that we can put in the car Luka shrugs and Maggie says that I'll feel like a princess pushing this thing around. My observation that princesses don't push baby carriages around because they have nannies for that is brushed aside and it's not until Luka finally looks at the price tag and turns kind of green that he sees sense. He's disappointed.  
  
"Shame – it's sort of . . . sporty" he says.  
  
"You're crazy."  
  
"The carriage lines, that suspension . . . "  
  
"Oh, sure. It's sporty like a Rolls Royce is sporty."  
  
"You don't want a Rolls Royce?"  
  
"Not at these prices. And it probably eats gas."  
  
"But – " and then he sees the joke and allows himself to be torn away. Truth is I'm sort of disappointed too. I rest a finger on the handle and watch as the body sways on its suspension straps and I think of the little boat in Vodice and I have to smile. In the end we settle for practical over beautiful but it reminds me that there's a conversation we have to have, a real serious conversation, and not one I'm looking forward to at all; no, not at all.  
  
Actually he takes it well; a little resistance but I expected that.  
  
"It was good while it lasted," he says, "It was fun, we had some good times. But you're right. People change, need different things."  
  
"I know this is hard, Luka, but you'll get over it. You know it's better this way."  
  
"I guess." He takes one last, longing look at the Viper, runs a hand lovingly over its wing before handing over the keys to the guy at the lot and taking the keys of the sensible Volvo which is our new car.  
  
"You want to drive?" he asks, gloomily. "I don't have the heart for it."  
  
He's a little more enthusiastic when I outline my plan for testing just exactly how roomy these things are in back but afterwards I still drive it home.  
  
I don't know where he's gone. He just said he had something to do so here I am, Sunday morning, kicking my heels. If I still have heels. I sure as hell don't have ankles any more. I do have a cleavage though and I'm wondering how long that will last when he comes home. I lean back against him as he wraps his arms around me and I'm trying to figure out what the faintly familiar smell clinging to him is.  
  
Oh.  
  
"How was it?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"Church."  
  
"You know?"  
  
"You smell of incense."  
  
"Oh." There's a pause. "I can't see their faces any more." What do I say to that? "It used to be easy. I thought it would be easy today." Today. Oh, shit, shit, shit. Today.  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"Don't be. I'm not."  
  
"No?"  
  
"No." The words come slowly now, his head bent, like in the confessional, mouth close to my ear, his breath stirring my hair a little, just a little. "When we were together before . . . I . . . sometimes, when I looked at you . . . I saw her." Wow.  
  
"You couldn't see me?"  
  
"No, no I saw you. I think it was because – " he falters.  
  
"Go on."  
  
"I think it was because you couldn't see me. I knew you couldn't. I needed to see someone who saw me." And wow again.  
  
"You see me now?"  
  
"Always." His hold on me tightens for a second. "Always."  
  
"I wish – "  
  
"Don't wish. Don't wish."  
  
"OK. No wishing. Just . . . doing."  
  
He's quiet for a long time before he says "Yes."  
  
....................................................................................................  
  
I could have been, I don't know, upset that he did that, went to church without me. Time was I would have been, like when he didn't mind me going to that fundraiser with Carter. I mean, we're married, not joined at the hip. Joined at the heart. Barf.  
  
And also – totally wrong. I'm getting that this is as much about thinking as feeling, about understanding more than, well, more than sharing. There's stuff, vast acreages of stuff, that we can't share, not ever. The fallout is what we share. And, you know, you can't think with your heart. You might as well try and think with your spleen or your liver – doesn't work, it's not what it's meant for. And here's the weirdest thing of all; sometimes - and I feel like I should whisper this - sometimes I think I'm better at this stuff than he is. Not had to do it so much I guess while me, well, I'm all sponsored and rehabbed and 12 stepped up, it should be a piece of cake for me. Yeah. Go me.  
  
So I get a little kick out of the fact that sometimes he's the one who lays out his thoughts for me, like he's just checking, like I'm the one who knows how to do this stuff. He looks at me to see if we're keeping up. So far so good.  
  
I used to have this idea that I thought too much, but I didn't, not really. I had thoughts, sure, but I didn't do anything with them, nothing useful anyhow. And forget quality control. I never once stopped to say to myself that this thought was ridiculous, or that thought was damaging or mean or, well, just, you know, wrong, because what I really had were feelings, and lots of them. Well, maybe not lots of them – pretty much the same one but in a comprehensive range of colours and styles. And feelings, well they are what they are, they just come at you, so the good, bad, mean, stupid, wrong stuff didn't really figure at all. I took 'em all on and kept finding room for them.  
  
It's like when you keep buying clothes; comes a time when the closet is full and all your stuff gets squished up together and you can't even see what you have and you just keep wearing the stuff you can get at, not what you really want or what's right for you. I did that with my feelings, kept slipping into the old comfortable stuff even if it made me look drab and didn't really suit me any more and God, I knew I was ready for a makeover. But just like guys don't sort out the attic or the basement when it's full of so much crap that it's useless – maybe even dangerous – I sure as hell didn't sort out that closet.  
  
Am I rambling? Indulge me. But see, here's what I found out; thinking, it's like clearing out the closet or the basement or the attic. Those few days when Luka was sick, it was like this whole baby thing was the last tiny little thing that got put in the attic and, holy crap, there goes the ceiling. And me, I've got a whole new wardrobe, whole outfits of new thoughts and ideas and, in the end, feelings. I like these much better, I think they suit me, make me look younger, feel younger, a lot sexier, a new woman. Well, yeah, OK, so I've got some of the old stuff in a garbage bag in the back of the closet, but I'll get round to it, and even if I don't I don't think I'll ever be wearing it again.  
  
And I don't need anyone else to tell me that I look great in this new stuff. I see the evidence, like when you walk past those big store windows and you think "Whoa, who's the good looking chick? Hey! It's me!". And so now I'm thinking "Who is this woman who was OK with her husband going to church to remember his dead wife and kids and who thought more about him than about herself? Holy crap! It's me!"  
  
Which is why it's weird that I'm kind of panicking over this one thing, this one thing I've been thinking about. Maybe I'm not so sure that Luka has the attic sorted and you know, if you just even ask a man "Did you finish clearing out the attic?" they'll say you're nagging even if it has been months – or, say, 12 years – that it's needed doing. Hey, I know whereof I speak; my attic's been a mess for more than 30 years and nagging never got me off my ass to do anything about it. My ceiling had to pretty much crash down on my head too. But like reformed smokers and drinkers, the reformed hoarder is nothing if not zealous. Still. I'm going to have to find out, and I'm going to have to do it soon. 


	15. Part 14

Anyone still reading this? Sounds pitiful I know, but the odd review would be nice, even if it's just to say you hate it.  
  
Part 14  
  
I found chestnuts in the store today; brown, smooth, glossy, same shape as me out front now. The chimney's been swept (I didn't know that they use a vacuum kind of thing now, no brushes. I used to like running outside to watch for the brush when I was a kid. The guy who did the chimney always gave candy to the kid who shouted first. Happy days, right?) and I've made a fire so while Luka showers and changes after work I set to roasting them on the shovel, only I forget to make the little slits in the shells, and the results of that are pretty spectacular. Anyway, when he's cleared up the mess and we've successfully done another batch we're sitting in the quiet listening to something Luka's put on, some string quartet or other, I don't know. I like it. I'm picking bits of chestnut shell from under my fingernails; my legs are resting across his knees and he's painting my toe nails for me because I can't reach to do it any more.  
  
So, here goes nothing.  
  
"Can I talk to you?"  
  
"I don't know – you make an appointment?"  
  
"I had one with Coburn today."  
  
"Everything OK?" He's anxious.  
  
"It's all fine, everything's fine."  
  
"So?"  
  
"So . . . we talked about pain relief." He looks at me steadily, waiting. "And I've decided that I don't want any."  
  
"Nothing?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"You're sure? I mean, no Fentanyl maybe, I understand that, but – "  
  
"I want to be in on this, all of it. I want to feel it, for real. And I've seen women do it on their own. I've spent a lot of my life trying not to feel anything at all, Luka. I can do this, it's what I want. I want to see what I'm made of."  
  
"You do know they'll try and talk you out of it."  
  
"Coburn tried already."  
  
"And you might feel a little differently after twelve hours of labour."  
  
"I know." Deep breath. "That would be your job." He puts the brush back into the bottle of polish carefully.  
  
"OK."  
  
"OK?"  
  
"OK. Whatever you want – your show. You've seen enough of it to know what you're getting into." That's it?  
  
"That's it?"  
  
"There should be more?" Shit – wrong footed again.  
  
"I was thinking, just, you know, wondering if maybe I should talk to someone."  
  
"About what?"  
  
"About being, sort of . . . back up."  
  
"For what?"  
  
"For you."  
  
"I'll need back up?"  
  
"In case you can't, you know, in case when it comes to it you can't . . . do it."  
  
"Do what?"  
  
"Be there."  
  
"Why would I not be able to be there? I've cleared it with Kerry if it should happen when I'm on."  
  
"I don't mean that." Ah. Now he gets it.  
  
"Wait, you mean you think you should ask someone to be there instead of me?" I don't answer. "You have someone in mind? Carter maybe?" Oh, shit.  
  
"Now you're mad; don't be mad. I just thought, after everything you went through a while back, I thought maybe you wouldn't . . . couldn't . . . "  
  
"I'm not mad."  
  
"You are."  
  
"I'm not. I'm . . . I don't know what I am. I mean, you think that what we went through was for nothing then?" We. Damn. Yeah, I'm so great at this stuff.  
  
"I just – I know how you felt and I thought maybe you'd at least, you know, have a choice and not feel like you were bailing on me."  
  
"Because of course I wouldn't feel that, would I?"  
  
"I didn't want – "  
  
"Abby." He cuts me off, speaking gently, making me look at him. "You remember when my father came over? Of course you do. I had it all playing out in my head from the minute he told me he was coming. I knew how you'd feel, I knew how you'd suffer, I knew what you'd think. You remember what you said to me?" Of course I do.  
  
"No."  
  
"Abby."  
  
"I said I didn't need you to imagine that stuff for me" I mumble.  
  
"What?"  
  
"I said I didn't need you to imagine that stuff for me" I almost shout at him.  
  
"Well," he gathers the polish, cotton wool and remover up and puts them all neatly back in their box, carefully lowers my feet to the ground and stands up. He leans over me, arm braced against the back of the couch and kisses me lightly. "right back at ya." 


	16. Part 15

Thank you all for the reviews; I know it seems pathetic but really sometimes we artists, who are tender flowers with fragile egos, need to know that someone's still reading! And see – a much quicker update than last time.  
  
Mandarin – thank you for your considered opinion; happy to have made you laugh.  
  
Part 15  
  
"Hey. Wake up."  
  
I did it again, fell asleep in the bath.  
  
"You were dreaming. Seemed upset."  
  
"It's a weird dream."  
  
"Tell me?" He's down on his haunches, eyes level with mine.  
  
"Later. Water's getting cold." He helps me up and out of the tub, tonight, as every night, getting wet for his pains. "Above and beyond" I crack. A shrug.  
  
"It's my job."  
  
"Romantic."  
  
"I'm happy in my work." The towel he wraps around me is warm from the radiator.  
  
"Is that what it is? Work?"  
  
"Isn't it?"  
  
"I don't know, I never thought about it like that." Well, you know, that isn't true, but I'm curious. There's something to be said here and the least I can do is prompt him. Do you think maybe it's a language thing? God, I can't imagine having to talk about this stuff in another language. For all I know, let him go in Croatian and there'd be no stopping him. Maybe with Danijella – oh, speak of the devil.  
  
"Dani and me," he's drying my back and I can't see his face, "we never got this far. The children, money, the war – always something else to worry about. We never got to the place when we had to make ourselves remember what it was we fell in love with, you know, start loving each other in spite of what we were. That's when the work would have started I guess." There's a pause as my nightshirt is dropped over my head and he looks at me steadily, waiting.  
  
"Is that where we are?" He laughs a little at that.  
  
"We've always been there."  
  
"We have?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
"Not easy, is it?"  
  
"You noticed that, huh?"  
  
"Well, you know, with my superior communication skills and powers of perception . . . "  
  
"You can joke, but – "  
  
"You think I'm joking?"  
  
"– but it's true. You, you hide behind the smart ass stuff and I . . . well, I just hide. But I do get it, you know, every now and then."  
  
"I think we're doing fine."  
  
"You do?"  
  
"Well, you know, getting there."  
  
"I think that's all there is . . . getting there."  
  
"Nice to have some congenial company on the road, though. I mean, Angela, meetings, they're OK, but us . . . that's the real stuff."  
  
"I hope so."  
  
"I know so." He's pleased with that and I say what I have to. "I'm sorry – about earlier."  
  
"No need."  
  
"Sure there is. I gave you a pretty hard time for doing the same thing to me."  
  
"You were right. And so was I. Hold still." He's taken my head between his hands and is tilting my face up toward the light.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Just checking."  
  
"Checking what?" I'm remembering the morning he looked at my still bruised eye when I stayed at his place after Brian. I feel a little hot suddenly.  
  
"Looks like you got it out by yourself."  
  
"I have no idea what you're talking about."  
  
"The plank. In your eye." My look must be as blank as my mind because he goes on "Didn't those nuns teach you anything?"  
  
"Obviously not."  
  
"You know, the one you should take out of your eye before bitching about the speck of dust in someone else's?"  
  
"Oh, that plank. I think we called it a beam."  
  
"Lost on you."  
  
"What, we're trading proverbs now? Bring it on, because I'll kick your ass, Mr. Little Talk."  
  
"Hey, at least I know my Bible. Look, you meant well; counts for a lot."  
  
"You meant well too."  
  
"Which is why you forgave me." He perches on the edge of the tub and pulls me in close, or at least as close as my size and shape will allow.  
  
"No way, that was nothing to do with you or your good intentions, which, while we're getting Biblical, we all know pave the road to Hell."  
  
"No?"  
  
"No, that was your dad. He scared the shit out of me. He told me to forgive you and I didn't stop to argue." He rests his head on the baby.  
  
"So I have my dad to thank for this?"  
  
"Ignoring how really creepy that sounds, I guess so. He's a remarkable man."  
  
"One word for him." His breath is hot through the fabric of my nightshirt.  
  
"And he has a remarkable son."  
  
"You think Damir's remarkable?"  
  
"Funny. Although of course he's very handsome and if I'd met him first . . . "  
  
"I think perhaps you can stop now."  
  
"No, maybe I'd have made a good lawyer's wife."  
  
"You make a great doctor's wife."  
  
"I do?"  
  
"Can't imagine anyone better."  
  
"Smooth."  
  
"I thought so."  
  
"You ready for bed?"  
  
"Always."  
  
"I didn't mean – "  
  
"I know. Come on – you're sleeping for two now."  
  
I'm on the edge of sleep when he says "You wouldn't have asked Carter, would you?"  
  
"For back-up? No way." And I know it's true, I know the words would have turned to ashes in my mouth. He's quiet for a long moment before he answers, and I can hear the smile in his voice.  
  
"I knew that." 


	17. Part 16

6.30 am. It's my last day at work today. He's on before me and for now I get to lie in the dark of a winter's morning while he makes tea and toast and in a minute or so he'll bring it up here and sit with me while we eat breakfast and then he'll go start his shift. I like these dark mornings. It's very quiet here, no traffic much after the neighbours have left for work. Next door one side is a lawyer, single, no kids; I think maybe he's gay. The other side are two university teachers, kids grown up and gone. We went round for coffee and cake a while back, all very nice and neighbourly. The professors' house was a wreck, books stacked everywhere, dead houseplants, dirty crockery, about 200 cats. There was a sandwich under the sofa, I could see it. I'm pretty sure it could see me too. I don't recall seeing Luka actually sit down while we were there; guess he wasn't wild about the thick layer of cat hair covering every bit of furniture in the place, and when we left he said that if he wasn't asthmatic when he went in he thought he could feel it taking hold now. We returned the invitation to Mrs & Mrs Boffin and they came, pored over the bookshelves, asked Luka a million questions about Croatia, admired his dad's paintings. He was OK with it and we somehow ended up agreeing to look after their cats while they're away in Wisconsin for Christmas. I kinda hope 200 cats = 1 baby when it comes to babysitting. Then again, they'd probably lose the kid, put it down and forget where. We'd find our offspring at about three years old and half way through the Collected Works of Balzac. As it is they just left some of the cat hair from their clothes on our couch.  
  
We had Carter and Jing Mei round for dinner too. My idea. Luka wasn't crazy about it but went along with it pretty gamely. It was OK. I showed Jing Mei the nursery - and chalk another one up to me because she liked the green too – and left Luka and Carter downstairs talking about I don't know what because he wouldn't tell me when I asked. I think it was tough for Jing Mei, the baby stuff and I cut it short. I don't think it's going to last, her and Carter, just a feeling I have. I was trying to imagine Carter inviting Luka over for dinner if things had turned out different and I can't. Wouldn't have happened, too much . . . I don't know, but there'd be too much of it anyhow.  
  
Still, that's not the way things went, is it; I'm lying here about three years pregnant and it's Luka's baby, not Carter's. It's weird to think it might have been his if things had taken the other direction. Maybe it could; we never even talked about it. Anyway, there was Jing Mei, telling me she loved the green and having a little boy somewhere and obviously wanting to do it again and just as obviously knowing it wasn't going to happen with Carter. It made me sad for her, for them, although I couldn't say so. I'm pretty sure he wants kids like she does, but it would be her second child and I somehow know he wouldn't want that. And look at me. Luka's third child, I'm having his third child. Well, fourth if you count Nicole, and I guess I have to.  
  
There's a bad habit I've gotten into lately. I blame my hormones. I try to imagine what I'd have done in his place – if it was a choice between him and this baby – watch him die or let the baby go. No kidding, I can reduce myself to tears almost instantly with this. Sentimentality – imagining feelings without actually experiencing them. Cool definition, right? Not mine of course, it came from an English teacher I had, talking about mawkish Victorian literature, public hysteria over the death of Little Nell, that stuff. Crazy. Like we don't all have enough pain without appropriating someone else's. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof. He says he knows his Bible; wonder if he knows that one.  
  
Sure he does.  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
"Snow's forecast"  
  
"Great."  
  
"Tonight probably. Move over. You want the paper?"  
  
"I can look when you're gone."  
  
"You going to take it easy this morning? Get some rest?"  
  
"I am going," I say as I heave myself upright and he arranges pillows behind me, "to practice my look of delighted astonishment in front of the mirror so that I can arrange my features appropriately when they spring the shower on me tonight. Pass the peanut butter."  
  
"I don't know how you can eat that stuff."  
  
"I can eat it with a spoon. I am Joe Black."  
  
"Who?"  
  
"Never mind. Your dad likes it."  
  
"I rest my case."  
  
"Come on, at least I'm not eating it with saurkraut or coal or any crazy crap like that." He laughs softly and shakes his head, concentrating on the paper.  
  
"Have your dream again last night?" he asks, without taking his eyes from the letters page.  
  
"You can tell?"  
  
He shrugs. "I don't know, you got a little . . . agitated. So – tell me?"  
  
I can't believe I'm telling him this, but I give it a go.  
  
"So anyway, I'm feeling all exhausted and happy and they're all smiling and you're smiling and they take the . . . baby away and do all the usual stuff. I can't see anything but they tell me it's a good APGAR, everything's fine and then the OB, who is actually the old guy who sells flowers by the gate at the hospital, I mean except when it's Bill Murray. Or Barbara Stanwyck.  
  
"Barbara Stanwyck? Really?"  
  
"Oh, you ain't heard nothin' yet. Anyway, Flower Guy or Bill or Barbara tells me that it's a female."  
  
"A female."  
  
"Yep. Because it's a . . . well, it's a rabbit."  
  
He nods and looks down very intently at his paper and he tries but there it is, a snort of laughter.  
  
"I knew you'd laugh, you bastard, I knew it."  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"It's not funny, it's a bad feeling."  
  
"I know."  
  
"I mean, I'm holding this baby rabbit – "  
  
"I think they're called kittens."  
  
"- and I know it's all wrong but you all seem to think it's OK so I smile along with you – wait a minute - what do you mean you know?"  
  
"With Danijela it was a cat. A fish one time."  
  
"You're making that up."  
  
"I'm not."  
  
"Same dream?"  
  
"Same dream." He's trying to be serious but that smile is still there in his eyes just waiting to bust out all over again. "Come on, classic anxiety dream, like when you find yourself at the grocery store or the gas station and you're naked, or you're trying to intubate a patient with a corkscrew."  
  
"A what?"  
  
"Or a telephone or a hosepipe, whatever."  
  
"You dreamt that?" My turn to laugh.  
  
"You have to expect it. This is the biggest thing you and your body ever did; you're anxious, your body's anxious. You never heard this from the women you delivered?"  
  
"I think they were kind of past the dreaming stage by the time they got to me. Twenty minutes of relaxation and breathing and then demands for major drugs."  
  
"What about the other women in your pre-natal class?"  
  
"I can't talk to them, Luka, it kinda makes me feel queasy."  
  
"Maybe you should."  
  
"So . . . you think it's just worry."  
  
"Look, I did my psych rotation about a hundred years ago and I don't think we covered rabbits – "  
  
"Or fish."  
  
"– but it makes sense, doesn't it?"  
  
"Maybe I have more cause to worry than most."  
  
"Maybe. I don't think I can help you with that."  
  
"No, I don't think you can."  
  
"Thing is though – you love your rabbit, right?"  
  
"Right. I mean – it's cute. It's a rabbit. They're cute."  
  
"And it's yours."  
  
"Yes."  
  
"So there you are. "  
  
"There I am?"  
  
"Doesn't matter what it is or it isn't, doesn't matter what you expect. It is what it is and you love it."  
  
"And you don't think I'm crazy."  
  
"I didn't say that. Just . . . not about this."  
  
"Thanks. I think."  
  
"Don't meet problems half way. Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof."  
  
"What?"  
  
"It means – "  
  
"I know what it means. It's just . . . weird."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Because I was – never mind."  
  
"Finish your tea, get another couple of hours sleep. You're on at noon, right?"  
  
"Noon."  
  
"You want to get some lunch?"  
  
"I'll find you."  
  
"OK. I have to go." He leans over to kiss me. "Look after yourself. And Thumper."  
  
...................................................................................................  
  
I catch up with him at about one in the afternoon, his head bent at a curious angle to avoid the killer breath of the homeless guy who is waiting on a surgical consult, and who, when he sees me, shrieks that they've got me too and I back off, looking at Lydia questioningly.  
  
"He thinks he's being eaten alive by something inside him."  
  
"I know how he feels."  
  
"I think maybe this has more to do with his appendix" Luka says.  
  
"Let's hope you're right, Kovac, because I'm a little out of practice with Alien Incubi." Romano elbows Luka out of the way. "Stand aside, Vlad, the experts are here. Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, why does this guy not have an O2 mask on?"  
  
"He doesn't need it."  
  
"Well I do. Is it safe for an expectant mother to be breathing this stuff in?"  
  
A few minutes later and they're wheeling the guy out, Luka being dragged with them because he won't let go of his hand. As they reach the elevator halitosis guy shifts his grip to Romano's coat and bellows "Jeeeeesus loves you!" right in his face. Romano looks like he might throw up which has to be a first.  
  
"Well, I'm glad to hear that, sir, because everyone else thinks I'm an asshole, isn't that right, Dr. Kovac?"  
  
"Right as always, Dr Romano."  
  
"Get out, your wife's waiting. Perhaps something low fat, Nurse Kovac – piling on the pounds lately, aren't we?" The elevator doors slide closed on him.  
  
"Asshole."  
  
"I'll get my coat" he laughs, but as he's making for the lounge a gurney rolls in carrying a young guy who's been knocked off his motor cycle and whose foot is pretty much turned back to front; the paramedics snag Luka who looks back over his shoulder and mouths, over the young guy's terrified screams, "Sorry".  
  
"Getting something to eat?" It's Carter.  
  
"I was, but Luka just got dragged away." I'm waiting for him to offer to take over from Luka, but instead he says "OK then – my treat."  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
"You do know they'll try and talk you out of it."  
  
"Oh come on, not you too! Coburn already tried, Angela just laughed at me, Haleh told me I'm crazy."  
  
"And Luka?"  
  
"He's OK with it."  
  
"Really?"  
  
"Really."  
  
"He's going to let you do this?"  
  
"Let me? He can't stop me. And he hasn't tried." He's looking out of the window now although I know he can't see anything because it's steamed up to hell, and he has the patented Carter smirk on his face.  
  
"What?" I ask him. "What's it to you anyway?"  
  
"It's brutal, Abby; I saw Carol and Deb do it."  
  
"I've seen hundreds of women do it."  
  
"They weren't communing with nature you know. Nature doesn't care about mothers, she tears holes in them."  
  
"I'm talking about going without pain relief, not squatting in a tent in the middle of a field."  
  
"And of course the first Mrs Kovac did it, right?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"You're not trying to prove something here by any chance?"  
  
"You know, I'm going to pretend that you didn't just say that."  
  
"Well, I did. Are you?"  
  
"Trying to prove something? You bet your ass. I'm trying to prove that I can do this, for me. Luka hasn't tried to talk me out of it because, unlike you, he seems to think I can make decisions for myself. My. Self. Nothing to do with him, or Dani or anyone else. Why can't you get that? And for the record you have no idea what this has already cost him so you can stop right there with the agenda. Thanks for the lunch." I get up to go but he catches at my hand.  
  
"Cost him?"  
  
"Not that it's any of your business but you might want to stop and think what it's like to watch your baby born when you've already buried two others." Shit. I shouldn't have said that.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"You've – he's had problems with this?"  
  
The fight's gone out of me and I sit down again. "You could say that."  
  
"Well what – "  
  
"No. I'm not going to tell you about it. He's fine, we're both fine. We worked it out."  
  
"Look, I don't want this, fighting with you."  
  
"Then don't do it! I thought we were better than this."  
  
"We? There's a we?"  
  
"We. Us. There'll always be an us. You're my friend. Jesus if things had been different this could have been your baby. But it isn't and I'm glad it's Luka's. I love him. He loves me. You don't have to look out for me, that's his job and he's doing it just fine, you get that?"  
  
"I get that." He's looking out the window again, not smirking now, but sad. "Me and Deb ... "he starts, but doesn't finish. He smiles and shakes is head, like he's trying to dislodge something. "Never mind. Not now. Your last day, huh?" OK, we're changing the subject. I'm glad.  
  
"Last day. I get off at midnight and then I'm done."  
  
"Crappy last shift."  
  
"Better than an overnighter."  
  
"I guess. So – you all ready for the surprise baby shower?"  
  
"All ready." I run through my range of expressions, from embarrassed to coy to delighted to 'My, that's soooo pretty' even though what I'm looking at is hideous.  
  
"You should keep your return to nursing very much open."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Because you're a terrible actress." 


	18. Part 17

PART 17  
  
I have no idea what some of this stuff is for. I have enough clothes for triplets, boxes of wipes and lotions (Baby aromatherapy? Really?), a musical crib mobile which plays All The Pretty Horses, which always gives me the creeps somehow, and a monitor which does everything but make dinner and take out the trash. But then, from Kerry of all people, something just for me; a basket full of bath oils and scented candles "For mom". She gives me a real smile "You'll be invisible once this baby's born. I thought maybe you could use a little pampering while you have the chance. You won't have time to lie in the tub later." I'm touched, no, really, I am, and I don't know what to say, but there's more. She waits until everyone else has left the lounge and hands me another package. "For Dad". Then she's gone. I turn the package over in my hands but can't figure out what it is; I'm still wondering when Luka arrives.  
  
"Ready to go?"  
  
"I have another three hours to go."  
  
"No you don't; Kerry's sending you home."  
  
"She is?"  
  
"Told me earlier to pick you up at nine. Where are we going to put all this stuff?"  
  
"Beats me. You have the car outside?"  
  
"Still going to take about six trips."  
  
"Go grab a gurney – we can put it all on there."  
  
"Oh, beautiful and resourceful."  
  
"You better believe it. You think you could snag a wheelchair too? This whole walking thing sucks right now."  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
Outside the cold is like a slap in the face and it's snowing, big, feathery flakes.  
  
"White Christmas then." I say as I struggle with the seat belt.  
  
"Looks that way. When do you want to get a tree?"  
  
"Tree?" My mind goes straight to the little cherry and almond trees at the bottom of the garden.  
  
"Christmas tree."  
  
"We're getting one?"  
  
"Of course we're getting one." When I don't answer he goes on "We're not?"  
  
"I don't know. I hadn't thought about it."  
  
"I have. We should have one."  
  
"Maybe a little one."  
  
"It's a tree – they're supposed to be big. What's the point of a little Christmas tree? "  
  
"We have nothing to put on it."  
  
"We'll get stuff."  
  
"Doesn't seem right."  
  
"What?"  
  
"New stuff."  
  
"No?"  
  
"When I was little it was . . . it was seeing the same stuff coming out of the boxes each year that was part of the . . . "  
  
"Part of the what?"  
  
"Fun." I finish, flatly.  
  
"Must have been new once."  
  
"I wonder if Mom still has it all."  
  
"It's hers. We can make our own history. We should start now."  
  
I should be excited about that but instead I'm sad and sort of scared. I have to make a history when I've spent most of my life trying to pretend mine didn't happen. I can't talk about it right now because he's so obviously caught up in the idea.  
  
"You had dinner?"  
  
"I had dinner with Carter."  
  
"Really?"  
  
"Really."  
  
"He OK?"  
  
"He seemed a little . . . confused."  
  
"What about?"  
  
"You." His voice is tight.  
  
"What?" Jesus, what has the idiot been saying now?  
  
"You talked to him about your . . . plans."  
  
"I mentioned it, yeah." Shit.  
  
"Well . . . " he pauses, taking a left turn, "he mentioned it right back."  
  
"And?"  
  
"I don't think he approves."  
  
"I don't give a rat's ass if he approves."  
  
"Nicely put. He also seems to think that you're trying to prove something."  
  
"I am."  
  
"I don't think we're talking about the same thing."  
  
"Don't I know it."  
  
"I think . . . I think he meant well."  
  
"Sure."  
  
"Don't worry about it."  
  
"Look, I don't think things with him and Jing-Mei –" I don't know why I want to defend him.  
  
"Not my business."  
  
"I know. I just don't want you to – "  
  
"And I don't want him in our bedroom." This could turn into a fight without much effort from either of us.  
  
"He's my friend, Luka."  
  
"He's a friend you used to sleep with; he should tread carefully."  
  
"I'll speak to him."  
  
"No need. I think we . . . understand each other now."  
  
"Why does that not make me feel a whole lot better?"  
  
"Forget about it. He'll get over it. And if he doesn't, well, he doesn't. Not our problem." I can't think what to say to that. He's right, of course he's right. Carter isn't our problem, and yet . . . you know, sometimes I think aphids have the right idea – born pregnant, no need for all this complicated sex stuff. I mean, the sex stuff has its good points, from what I can remember, but there's always fallout, always baggage. He reaches over and covers my hand with his as the traffic light glows red in front of us.  
  
"He'll live."  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
The stuff from the shower covers the dinner table, and it's only as we stand back to take it all in that I remember the package in my bag.  
  
"What's this?"  
  
"For you."  
  
"Me?"  
  
"From Weaver."  
  
"You're kidding."  
  
"Nope."  
  
"What is it?"  
  
"How would I know? Open it."  
  
He stares down at what's in the wrapping paper.  
  
"Well?"  
  
"A camera."  
  
"A what?"  
  
"A digital camera." I pick up the tag which has fallen to the floor. "Luka -I thought you might be needing this. KW."  
  
"Wow." He's very quiet. I know he has no pictures of his kids except for the little black and white snap of Dani and Jasna he carries in his wallet. I meant to ask Ivica if he had any but it felt too weird and I never did. "Does she know . . . " I start.  
  
"I never told her." He looks at me questioningly and I shake my head. "Maybe Carol . . . "he says  
  
"Or maybe it has nothing to do with, well, to do with –"  
  
"I guess not. I should call her, say thank you."  
  
"You'll be seeing her tomorrow." He nods, passes a hand over his eyes. I have to move this on.  
  
"Hey, don't get ideas above your station. She bought me something too."  
  
"I can see that."  
  
"Not this stuff, something just for me." I find what I'm looking for and hold it up to show him. "Seems I should be pampered while I still have the chance."  
  
"Want to use some now?"  
  
"Join me? I have a mind to be kept company."  
  
"Think we'll both fit?"  
  
"I guess. I mean, if you don't mind smelling of – " I pause to look at one of the half dozen bottles of bath foam "– Tuberose & Geranium".  
  
"Oh, one of my favourites."  
  
"Come on then. Oh – and the camera stays here, right?"  
  
"You're no fun any more, you know that?" ...................................................................................................... 


	19. Part 18

PART 18  
  
If I lie . . . just . . . so . . . on my back on the floor I can rest my ankles on the seat of one of the dining chairs. After that it takes 27 minutes until I can see the bones in my ankles. A few minutes longer and I can fall asleep. A couple of nights ago I did just that and woke up to find my husband lying next to me.  
  
"This is . . . unusual" he says.  
  
"I'm comfortable."  
  
"And hey – long time no see!"  
  
"Since eight O'clock this morning?"  
  
"I was talking to your ankles."  
  
"Bastard. Help me up."  
  
........................................................................................................  
  
My ankles have been back for a while now and he's still on the 'phone. Ivica calls twice, sometimes three times a week, doesn't always take the trouble to think about the time difference. Those 2.00 am calls go down real well. Usually he talks to Luka and then me, and two nights ago he outdid himself.  
  
"So – you know what it is I am doing now?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"I'm opening packet. Taking out cigarette."  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"Smooth, white, fresh." I hear him inhale as he sniffs the damned thing. "Now I'm putting cigarette in my mouth. Lighting cigarette. Listen." I hear the click of the lighter. "Inhaling . . . exhaling."  
  
"You are a very wicked old man."  
  
"I know! Too old for 'phone sex, right, but 'phone smoking, this I can do!"  
  
"It's kind of dirtier somehow."  
  
"You don't tell your husband."  
  
"I might."  
  
"No, he don't get joke."  
  
"Sure he would."  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"He would. Now 'phone drinking . . . "  
  
"Of course! I never think of this! Next time maybe."  
  
"Next time."  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
This call's different. Luka's trying to keep his cool, barely getting a word in. I hear Damir's name, there's a pause and when the conversation picks up it's calmer. In the end he sounds weary and when he puts the phone down he comes and assumes his position on the floor at my side.  
  
"You OK?"  
  
"Yes." Liar.  
  
"Luka."  
  
"Guess what my father wants to send us for Christmas."  
  
"A horse."  
  
"Might as well be. Guess again."  
  
"God, Luka, I don't know."  
  
"The piano."  
  
"The what?"  
  
"My mother's piano."  
  
"You're kidding."  
  
"I wish."  
  
"Wow."  
  
"Indeed. Wow."  
  
"That's pretty generous."  
  
"Oh, God, don't tell me you think this is a good idea."  
  
"Well . . . "  
  
"I don't want it."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Can you play it?"  
  
"Well, no but – "  
  
"Me neither."  
  
"You learnt once."  
  
"Last time I laid a finger on it I was 13 years old. I think she was glad I gave it up. Too painful for her to hear."  
  
"I don't believe that."  
  
"Believe it."  
  
"Why does he want us to have it?"  
  
"He's leaving the apartment in Zagreb after Christmas and there's no room for it in Vodice."  
  
"What about Damir?"  
  
"Doesn't want it. He was worse than me and none of the kids are interested. Damir won't budge."  
  
I consider this for a moment. "Worse than you?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Well . . . we have the room."  
  
He sighs and brings his arm up and across his eyes. "I know." Another pause. "Have you any idea what it would cost to get it over here?"  
  
"I'm guessing it won't be cheap."  
  
"It won't even be expensive. It's out the other side of expensive. And just so it can sit and gather dust."  
  
"Hey, maybe Thumper will surprise us." He groans then. "Luka, it obviously means a lot to him."  
  
"I know. He was nearly crying."  
  
"Oh, come on, call him back. Tell him I want it."  
  
"He's sulking now."  
  
"OK then, in a while."  
  
"I don't want the damned thing!"  
  
"You're being unreasonable."  
  
"Me? I get to pay thousands of dollars to transport something I don't want and we won't use and that's unreasonable?"  
  
"Thousands?"  
  
"Jesus, I don't know, a lot of money."  
  
"He won't live forever Luka."  
  
"You don't think? He'll do it to spite me."  
  
"Luka – "  
  
"I don't want to talk about it." And he doesn't; he tells me he's going up to bed, but he hauls me to my feet before he goes. It occurs to me that I'll probably spend the rest of my life hearing him say he doesn't want to talk about stuff and then waiting an hour before it's safe to bully him into it. What the hell, it's not the worst thing I could spend my life doing.  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
He's not asleep. I know it; he knows I know it; I know he knows I know it. You keeping up here?  
  
"You know . . . you haven't asked me what I want for my birthday."  
  
"No."  
  
"Want a pointer?"  
  
"Wouldn't be a large and impractical item of furniture currently domiciled in an apartment in Zagreb would it?"  
  
"Might be." He turns to me now.  
  
"Why does this matter to you?"  
  
"Your father can't . . . what else can he do, sell it? It would break his heart."  
  
"I know."  
  
"Yours too."  
  
"You think?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
After a long silence he says "She really wanted us to be able to play, just one of us."  
  
"I know."  
  
"We couldn't, either of us. I mean I could play the notes but . . . not the music. She tried not to be disappointed but – "  
  
"She'd be proud of you now."  
  
"I know that." There's an edge of impatience in his voice. "But still it would be a . . . . a . . . "Oh boy, when he does this, struggles for a word, trouble would be real easy to find.  
  
"A reproach?"  
  
"Yes. A reproach. Every time I looked at it."  
  
"It's not."  
  
"But – "  
  
"It's not." Silence. "Do it for me."  
  
"You did not just say that."  
  
"Sure I did. What, you think I'm above a little emotional blackmail?"  
  
"Evidently not."  
  
"So – you'll do it? You'll call?"  
  
"I'll think about it."  
  
After a couple of minutes' silence I say "You ever see "Pretty Woman"?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"The film."  
  
"No, I don't think so."  
  
"We should rent it."  
  
"Dare I ask why?"  
  
"No."  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
"Why are we watching this? It's terrible."  
  
"Shut up."  
  
"No, I mean, you've seen the prostitutes that end up in the ER. They do not look like that and they're not going to find their millionaire any time – "  
  
"Shut up and watch the film."  
  
And, in due course, Richard Gere is playing random chords on the piano in the deserted restaurant and here comes Miss 44" inches of therapy in her fugly hotel bath robe and – there – she perches on the piano and he's up and at her and as their activities strike up various discords on the keyboard Luka's face is a picture.  
  
"On my mother's piano?" he asks, at once appalled and fascinated.  
  
"Got to get some use out of it until Thumper's old enough for lessons."  
  
"My mother's piano?" he repeats, transfixed.  
  
"Hey, if I know your father, it won't be the first time." He has a kind of puzzled half smile on his face.  
  
"You really don't play fair, you know that?"  
  
"I know that."  
  
He looks back at the crap on the screen for a moment and then sighs. "How the hell am I going to wrap it up?"  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
I don't know when he was going to call Ivica but the old man beats him to it. I've just seen Susan out. She comes by every so often, Jing-Mei too. Funny, I thought I'd miss work a whole lot more than I do, but I already feel like an outsider. I understand a little better how they must have felt too, going away and having to fit in when they returned – I think it must be like being a ghost, everything familiar to you but no-one really knows you any more. Anyhow, at the sound of Ivica's voice I shake myself out of that one.  
  
"Luka is not at home?"  
  
"Working. He won't be back until late."  
  
"And you? My grandchild treating you OK?"  
  
"Depends what you mean by OK."  
  
"Not much longer to wait, then you think this is paradise."  
  
"I always think that support and encouragement from family and friends is so important at a time like this."  
  
"I'm telling truth, don't have time for anything else."  
  
"You OK? You sound a little down."  
  
"Piano."  
  
"Ah. Well – "  
  
"Luka, Damir, they don't want it. I sell it."  
  
"No."  
  
"Yes, is a thing, just a thing. I sell it."  
  
"Send it."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I talked to him. It's going to be my birthday present."  
  
"For you? You can play?"  
  
"No."  
  
"So why – "  
  
"I want it. It's family, right?"  
  
"No. You don't have to do this."  
  
"I know. I want to do this. It would break your heart to sell it."  
  
"Hearts mend."  
  
"Not always. You're an old man, you don't have time to wait for it to mend, right?"  
  
"Is decided – I sell."  
  
"What is it with you Kovacs? You want us to have it and now I say we will you're saying no."  
  
"How did you talk him into it?"  
  
"Never mind, I did it, that's all you need to know. Look, I'll do a deal with you."  
  
"A deal?" He sounds sceptical.  
  
"We have the piano and when this kid's old enough for lessons – I'll take them too." Where the hell did that come from?  
  
"You're making a joke."  
  
"I'm not. You think I can't do I?"  
  
"I think . . . you do whatever you decide you want to do, is what I think."  
  
"You better believe it. I mean, I took your son off your hands."  
  
"Dirty job."  
  
"Yeah, well, someone had to do it."  
  
"Want another?"  
  
"Dirty job?"  
  
"Another of my sons."  
  
"Damir?"  
  
"Only other one I have. I think."  
  
"He's misbehaving, huh?"  
  
"Too big for his shoes."  
  
"Boots."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Too big for his boots."  
  
"Oh, OK, boots. Thinks he can tell me what to do."  
  
"Runs in the family."  
  
"Me? You mean me?"  
  
"Of course I mean you. Luka knows better."  
  
"But you love me very much."  
  
"You're growing on me."  
  
"Of course, deal means I have to live to see you do it."  
  
"Luka figures you'll live forever to spite him."  
  
"Could be he's right."  
  
"I kinda hope so."  
  
"You and baby, you can play duet at my funeral."  
  
"You want "Chopsticks" at your funeral?"  
  
"Chopsticks?"  
  
"It's a – never mind." There's a pause.  
  
"Abby . . . "  
  
"It's OK. I love the damned piano already." Another silence and I hear him take a deep breath.  
  
"So . . . you want that 'phone drink now?"  
  
"You know what, I don't believe I do."  
  
"Chicken."  
  
"Go boil your head, old man."  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
You're wondering what the point of all this is, right? Well come on, pay attention! Don't you see what I did there? I made a promise to an old man on the other side of the world over a collection of strings and keys and pedals and I made a plan. A plan for the future.  
  
I'm getting good at this. My past isn't a deafening roar any more, blocking out everything else, it's an echo, just an echo. And my future, well that's not the cross between an assault course and a ghost train it used to be.  
  
On our walls are paintings by Luka's father; in our house will be the piano Luka's mom played; that's where the past should be – decorating your walls and reflecting family photos and making you smile, and making your life brighter and filling your future with scales and arpeggios and whatever it is that piano lessons do, whatever it was that Luka's mom heard her boys do, except it will be this child doing it, joining up the past and the present and the future. For a minute there I'm so happy I could cry. I don't, cry I mean, because well, I just don't but there it is, one of those "You know what this is? You recognise this? This is happy" moments.  
  
Grow up, leave home, get a job, get married, get rich, get drunk, get laid, get whatever.  
  
That's not a plan.  
  
Me and piano lessons with my kid. That's a plan. 


	20. Part 19

AUTHOR'S NOTE:  
  
Some of you will have been reading this as a companion piece to Californiagirl's "Once More With Feeling" and will notice that there's a significant difference in the two stories in this chapter. CAGirl came up with a lovely idea which fits her Luka perfectly but I couldn't make it fit "my" Luka and so there's a different take on it. It doesn't affect the outcome of the story but I think it's interesting because it illustrates that, even though we're telling the same tale, things are rather different inside our heads! Anyway, I hope this doesn't feel like a "fracture" between the two stories or affect any pleasure you might have in reading mine.  
  
Part 19  
  
"It's comin' on Christmas,  
  
They're cutting down trees,  
  
They're putting up reindeer,  
  
Singing songs of joy and peace,  
  
Oh and I wish I had a river I could sail away on"  
  
That used to be my absolute favourite song for Christmas. Never mind your Silent Nights and your Joy To The Worlds, that was the real deal for me right there.  
  
Thanksgiving used to scare me more than Christmas. I could never think of anything to be thankful for except maybe still being alive at the end of it and I wasn't always too sure about that even. In the end I fixed on Eric and he fixed on me and we tried to block out the godawful day itself, the crazy mango, oyster and butterbean stuffing in the turkey, the year we all nearly died of food poisoning because the bird wasn't cooked properly. Not my first trip to the ER with my mom and not my last. Still, easier to explain to the doctor than the sleeping pills or the car exhaust or my broken wrist which had gotten slammed in a door when I tried to get away from her, or Eric's full blown panic attack when she wrapped him up in rug to keep him "safe" from her. One year she cooked dinner in her dressing gown and set it on fire. She'd set the table but forgotten the cloth and we had to ease it on without taking all the dishes off first. We ate dinner with her in her underwear, smashed out of her mind and making us sing Jingle Bells. I know she had years when she was good, taking her meds, she must have. I don't remember them.  
  
Christmas never seemed so bad. I was a kid and got caught up in it, doing stuff at school, and sometimes it was like Thanksgiving had gotten her all crazied out and it went off OK. We got presents even. A doll with a set of clothes she'd sewn herself; I recognised the pattern of her bedroom curtains. She always waited until the last minute to get a tree because they were cheaper. Of course they were also either the biggest or the smallest or the scrawniest or the ones with no needles; anyhow, the ones no- one else wanted. One year she forgot and we had the coat stand from the hallway draped in tinsel and lights, a star on top, our coats just left in a heap.  
  
A couple of times after I was married she came over for Christmas. Don't think I've ever spent days when I was so waiting for the other shoe to drop. Never did, leastways not while she was with us. A couple of days later we'd get a call from Eric saying she'd gotten drunk and picked a fight in a bar or she'd moved some guy in with her. Happy New Year.  
  
I was drinking then. We got drunk as shit together one Christmas night and I don't think I've ever laughed so hard in my life. Jesus.  
  
...............................................................................................................................................................  
  
So this year it's my job to get the stuff to put on the tree because it's our first tree and we have no stuff and you have to start somewhere, right? He wanted us to go together but I . . . I don't know, it seemed unbearable somehow. It felt about as scary as anything I've had to do since I sobered up, since we took each other on again. Is that crazy? It is, isn't it, it's crazy, but it's how I felt. He was disappointed but I said I had to do it alone or he could do it alone but we couldn't do it together and not to ask me why because I didn't know. It's different for him, it means different things, I'd have pissed on his parade. I stuck to my guns and he had to accept it, although not with very good grace. Man can he sulk.  
  
And that's how I come to be standing here alone. The green and gold and red, the lights, the gingerbread houses, I don't know, I'm standing in the middle of it all and I want to cry. Look at me. Standing in Marshall Fields fighting back tears among the artificial spruce and twinkling lights. A worried looking sales assistant touches my elbow and speaks quietly to me.  
  
"Can I help you Ma'am?"  
  
"No, no, I'm fine."  
  
"Can I get you a chair, a glass of water?"  
  
"No, really, it's nothing, I just need some air."  
  
"I'll walk you out."  
  
"Please, no, I'll be OK, I'm just a little . . . pregnant" and I manage a laugh.  
  
In the end I find myself looking at baby clothes, baby outfits like Christmas trees, elves, little Santa suits. Jesus. If I go and look at the cribs I'm pretty sure I'll find one put together like a manger. Who buys this stuff? But look here – socks, little baby socks, and if you press Rudolph's nose he sings "Jingle Bells". Hah.  
  
........................................................................................................  
  
"It isn't straight."  
  
"What?"  
  
"It's leaning over to the left." I don't know the exact meaning of the words he's muttering but I'm pretty sure they're nothing to do with peace on earth and I don't think goodwill toward men is anywhere in sight either.  
  
"Better?"  
  
"Yeah. Perfect."  
  
He stands up and steps back, a few pine needles in his hair. It's huge this tree, about a half inch short of the ceiling, the room smells of pine and I'm getting a kind of Christmas tingle thing going on.  
  
We were both working last Christmas and sort of relieved because we were still a little new and not real ready to do Christmas. We'd decided to start this baby; as I recall that was how we spent Christmas night after a day at the hospital treating the over indulgers, and the black eyes and busted teeth people wait all year to dole out to family and friends along with the bath salts and novelty ties. God, it seems like a long time ago.  
  
"That is very nice"  
  
"You like it?"  
  
"Yeah – you couldn't find a big one?"  
  
"You get the stuff?"  
  
"I got lights."  
  
"Just lights?"  
  
"Of course not. Wait here."  
  
He's surprised by the three Marshall Fields bags I come back with and he winces as I drop them onto the dining room table, obviously anticipating shards of shattered coloured glass. Instead they land with a dull thud.  
  
"That's it?"  
  
"Take a look." He upends one of the bags onto the table.  
  
"Baby socks?"  
  
"150 pairs. And look – these play 'Jingle Bells'. Oh, and these play 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town'. I wanted to get all musical ones but you should see the price. I got a lot reduced because they're for summer."  
  
"We'll never use all these."  
  
"I know." From the other bag I pull three little boxes and throw one at him. He opens it and tips the contents onto the table.  
  
"Hooks."  
  
"Not a hell of a lot gets past you does it. Look." I take one of the little socks and thread a hook through it before hanging it on the tree. "Voila."  
  
"Truly this is the daughter of Maggie."  
  
"You have no idea." I settle down at the table. "I'll hook, you hang."  
  
............................................................................................................................................................  
  
Christmas day he's home and we do nothing much at all. Luka downs a couple of glasses of Loza for breakfast and I eat chocolate for mine. And we don't bother to dress at all. What? It's Christmas. My mom calls and Tatijana and all three kids say thanks for their presents and wish us a Merry Christmas and Happy new year in English and then in Croatian and Josip sings something which sounds traditional but I have a feeling he's doctored the words because I hear Tatijana gasp and she grabs the 'phone from him. Ivica's there too sounding as though his particular brand of Christmas spirit is about 140 proof and I think I know who helped Josip dirty up the words to his song, and he tells me he's doing it for me as I can't so it for myself and isn't Christmas total crap for a reformed drunk? I use a couple of Croatian obscenities Luka has taught me for just such an occasion and the old man cackles before the 'phone is grabbed again, this time by Damir who falls all over himself with saying sorry and I tell him it's OK because I have the satisfaction of knowing that tomorrow his father will have a hangover the size of Texas. ...............................................................................................................................................................  
  
Anyhow, Clarence has got his wings and James Stewart is back in the bosom of his family with his wifely little wife and his gaggle of kids and his crazy uncle and heroic brother and the tart with a heart and everyone who has just saved Bailey Savings & Loan's homely little ass. As the credits roll he sighs and says "Cheesy."  
  
"Of course."  
  
"Cheese is good. So – you want your present now?"  
  
"My what?"  
  
"Your present." Shit.  
  
"We said we weren't going to buy each other – "  
  
"I know."  
  
"So – "  
  
"I didn't buy it."  
  
"This is a shitty trick to pull, Kovac."  
  
"Shut up." He reaches under the couch and pulls out a package about a foot square, flat. I look at it like it's a bomb. "Open it."  
  
A minute later with the wrapping lying at my feet I'm looking down at this gift. I'm looking down at myself.  
  
"How – "  
  
"My dad did it. Doesn't matter if you don't like it."  
  
Don't like it? I can't take my eyes off it. Watercolour, my face, indistinct, but the eyes are clear, laughing. I recognise the image from one of the wedding pictures Carter took. In that I'm smiling up at Luka but he's been left out of this so I'm kind of disembodied.  
  
"Turn it over."  
  
On the back is a signature, illegible, and a sketch, a self portrait of Ivica, cigarette dangling from his lips, something a little lewd about the expression in his eyes. Suddenly I wish he were here. Turning the picture over I look back at myself.  
  
"Do I look like that?" He looks at me for a moment before he says softly "Yeah." OK, now those tears I held in in Marshall Fields come roaring triumphantly back. We manage to make love for what turns out to be the last time before the baby is born, giggling and uncomfortable and afterwards he laughs and says he should have me painted more often.  
  
........................................................................................................  
  
Heredity. It's a funny thing. Luka can't do what his mother could do, or his dad; hell, he hasn't even inherited the old man's capacity for drink. He tells me he's sketched a little off and on but not well and why keep a dog and bark yourself and his father has to be good for something.  
  
And me, I realise that I picked up some stuff from my mom, even if I'm only now starting to use it. That stuff that sent her looking for Christmas trees on Christmas Eve, that made her always at least try to cook the damned turkey for Thanksgiving and sew doll clothes from curtains. She always got up again, except when she couldn't; she always went for it, even if the results were a disaster for her and us and everyone who came near her, and she always loved. I can do that now and I can do it because I decided I wanted to. Well sure, it helps having someone to love who loves me right back but it's not about Luka, this. It's me. I did it all myself and if I hadn't there'd be no Luka around to love, no baby to scare the living crap out of me, no getting through all the shit about his kids and no knowing that if it took him down I'd do it all on my own.  
  
Me? I rock. 


	21. Part 20

PART 20  
  
January 6th.  
  
We took down the Christmas tree tonight and the place looks empty. The little pine needles that keep finding their way into my bare feet aren't much of a bonus either.  
  
My mom 'phoned New Year's Eve, got all guilty and apologetic because we were in bed at midnight. I mean in bed sleeping. He had a shift next morning, 6 O'clock start, and I was in no mood for sitting watching the hands of the clock inching toward midnight and another year. Ivica 'phoned too. I didn't understand a word he was saying, even when he was speaking English.  
  
It's my birthday in 4 days, anniversary of the first time I took a drink after 6 years sober, anniversary of the start of a totally shitty period of my life. Luka wants us to go out, celebrate, do something but so far I'm adopting a strategy of silent non cooperation. I don't know what it is; maybe all this waiting, all this being huge, the weather so vile that I haven't been outside since the day after Christmas when we went round to the lawyer next door for drinks and canapés. He was kind of nice. The professors were there too and I could see the lawyer guy's silent despair as they spread cat hair over his white linen couches, spat little fragments of chicken liver pate and sushi onto his cherry wood coffee table, scrubbing it off with a grimy pullover sleeve, dropped marinated olives onto his silk Persian rug. He caught my eye and looked guilty but I smiled sympathetically and he smiled back. The professors Backhaus explained that we'd been feeding their cats whilst they were away and I jumped in and said actually Luka did that, pregnant women and cat litter boxes not being an ideal mix. Robin – that's the lawyer's name, Robin – looked at Luka like he was Superman then, awestruck. I think we're going to get along well with Robin.  
  
........................................................................................................  
  
It's a cliché that doctors make the worst patients; well OB nurses make the worst expectant mothers, I can tell you that for free. Truth is I'm bored with it all; I know all this stuff, see, I've seen it all a thousand times and more. I keep my OB appointments, I pee into the little container (normal) read off my BP (a little on the high side, nothing to worry about) listen in horror as they relay to me what my weight is because I can't see from up here, learn that the baby is engaged, then not, then engaged again, look at the other moms in the waiting room.  
  
We've been doing the birthing classes, different positions, candles light, whale song. And, as we all looked like beached whales that was pretty appropriate and I could see that he was trying not to smile and knew he thought the same thing. And I could tell he felt strange being there, listening to the excited chitchat, especially with the ones who were doing this for the first time. We smiled and told them that yes this was our first baby and it's true of course, it's the first we've had together but still.  
  
The worst thing is I can't bear to talk to the other women – or listen to them. One, her name's Kara or Kelly or something, I don't know, she wears a sugar pink jogging suit and matching trainers and socks, her hair full of clips and ribbons, and she calls her husband "Hubby". I want to hit her. Luka seems transfixed by her, like he can't quite believe what he's seeing and I can see that he's trying real hard not to laugh and I want to hit him too. Still, he looks at me a little anxiously when it all turns to what we'd like; so far I haven't said "I don't care as long as it's not cursed with a chronic mental illness" but I've come close if only to shut Kelly the hell up.  
  
I went to see Angela and she listened patiently while I whined, stuck a footstool under my feet and balanced a cup of tea on top of the baby before sitting down with a cup of coffee which smells nearly as strong as the stuff Luka drinks. The cat's still trying to freak me out.  
  
"Why doesn't he like me?"  
  
"Who?"  
  
"Guss." That's the cat's name, Guss. Oh, I don't know.  
  
"Honey, that cat doesn't like anyone. So what's the big deal here?"  
  
"Maybe I'm going wrong with this, maybe this is the addict wanting it all now, not just living in the moment."  
  
"Say what?" I'm starting to feel a little awkward. "You talk to the other moms?"  
  
"No. And that's another thing. I hate all that. It's like being pregnant for a living, like it's the only thing I'm about. I'm just . . . I'm not open to what they have to say." Jesus, did I just say that? Shoot me now. She feels the same and snorts derisively.  
  
"And what is it they have to say?"  
  
"Nothing, just nothing. Disposable diapers or cloth, baby monitors, strollers, cribs, microwave bottle warmers, baby names, intra uterine learning programmes, pre-pre-school." She's laughing now, flapping fat legs and sloshing coffee onto herself.  
  
"Goddammit, that's hot!" She dabs at the muddy stain. "Hell, who in their right mind wants to talk about that? You want to know what I think?" She doesn't wait for an answer. "You're not abnormal girl, you're pregnant, very pregnant, 150% knocked up. No-one likes this. I didn't, my mom didn't, bet your mom didn't. Hell, I bet the Virgin Mary was a little cranky right about the start of December. Backache, headaches, bloating," and here she pauses to look at my ankles, "no sleep, acid, peeing all the damned time. Shit, you don't have to be an alcoholic to hate it. You are living the moment. It's just that the moment really, really sucks."  
  
So, just before Christmas I tell Luka I don't want to go again and anyway what's the point as I'm due so soon. I've had it with the candles, the whale song, the beanbags, the fooling ourselves that the birthing plans we all write out will mean a damn thing when push comes to, well, to push.  
  
"You sure?"  
  
"Couldn't be surer."  
  
"It's only another few classes"  
  
"In which I will learn nothing I don't already know except that Kara will be listening to Celine Dion throughout her labour and I may have to kill her. You don't want this baby to be born in a State Correctional Facility do you?"  
  
Actually I think he's relieved. A while back I got him to agree that he'll give me 3 shots at giving up before he did anything about it. I didn't doubt that he'd lay the OB out cold if she tried to interfere and that's when he fessed up about Brian. I don't know if he was surprised when I told him I knew, had always known. He was a little surprised when I owned up to kind of liking what he did. He wasn't proud of it – but I was. Bad old me.  
  
...................................................................................................... January 10th  
  
40 weeks. I'm in limbo. I want this pregnancy to be over and I want it not to end; I want my body back and I don't want to give up this person living in here; I want to get outside and breath fresh air and I want to burrow down into my nest right here and never come out; I want to talk to my Mom and I dread her nightly calls.  
  
The weather is better today. It's still as cold as hell but it's not snowing, or sleeting or raining and the wind's dropped. The sky is actually blue. My mom called this morning to say happy birthday and asked what we were doing to celebrate and in the end we got a little PO'd with each other because I wasn't playing the game and then I felt PO'd with myself. Great. Luka didn't get in until five this morning and I didn't wake him when I got up. He's on at ten tonight and still sleeping so for now I sit and listen to the clock ticking and stare out of the window down toward the little trees at the bottom of the garden which looks weird in the sunshine after so long under grey skies. The grass is still hidden under grey snow but it's amazing what a little sunshine will do.  
  
I can hear Luka upstairs now, showering, and I put on some coffee and take the bowl of eggs out of the fridge but they slip and when he comes downstairs I'm still looking down at the mess of shells and yolks and snotty whites and crying and crying and crying. He doesn't even ask me what's wrong and I'm so thankful for that that I cry some more and he just guides me up the stairs to our bed and lies down with me until I fall asleep.  
  
It's one o'clock when he wakes me and tells me to put on extra socks and my warm boots, another pullover, my warmest coat, a hat, my scarf and have I got my gloves? I don't even ask why. As it turns out he parks the car by the lake and we walk a little and the cold clear air is brilliant as it rushes into my lungs. He opens the tailgate of the car and there's a hamper with hot soup and bread and a very small cake with a candle and it's the best picnic I ever had in my life. Dancing to the Rolling Stones on the car stereo in the cold earns us some strange looks from the handful of brave souls by the lake, but what the hell? It's starting to get dark by the time we leave and the lights of the city around the lake are so pretty and I manage not to be annoyed by the Christmas lights even though I think they should be taken down on December 26th.  
  
Before he leaves for work he cooks and I try to eat it but without much success and he tells me he doesn't know why he bothers, slaving over a hot stove and there are starving kids who'd be glad of sole meuniere and lemon cheesecake. At the look on my face he says softly "Joke, Abby, it's a joke." Shit.  
  
"You shouldn't have filled me up with hot soup."  
  
"I know. I blame myself."  
  
"I blame you too."  
  
"Happy birthday."  
  
"Not very." After a moment I add "But, you know – not the worst I've had."  
  
"No?"  
  
"Not by a long way."  
  
"I daren't ask." At that moment the 'phone rings; it's Ivica and he sings happy birthday to me and tells me my present is crated up and on its way and has Luka got his lazy ass in gear and hung my picture yet. I lie and tell him he has but when I hand Luka over to him it seems he asks him too and Luka, not knowing what I've said hums and haws and makes excuses for not doing it and Ivica tells him he's lucky he has a wife who will lie for him.  
  
He runs me a bath, helps me in and out of it, helps me into my nightclothes, tucks me into bed, kisses me just lightly and tells me tomorrow will be better.  
  
"And later, when everything is more settled, in the summer, we'll go out, celebrate the lost birthday, how would that be?"  
  
"It would be good."  
  
"Of course it would."  
  
"I'm – "  
  
"No, you're not sorry, you're not allowed to be sorry on your birthday. Go to sleep."  
  
"Yes, dad."  
  
But I don't; I wait until I hear him leave for work and I go with him in my head to keep him company in the car in the middle of the freezing night and when I know he's walked through the ER doors into the warm I close my eyes and think maybe it wasn't such a bad birthday after all. 


	22. Part 21

Part 21  
  
January 11th.  
  
Doorbell. Damn. I knew this was a mistake – now I have to roll onto my side, then onto all fours and slowly right myself, and my ankles aren't even back yet. And I'm not expecting visitors and I look terrible and oh, great, Carter.  
  
"Happy Birthday!"  
  
"Yesterday."  
  
"You sure?"  
  
"I'm going to pretend you didn't just say that. Come in, you're letting the cold air in."  
  
And in he comes, the flowers obscuring his whole head, and he drinks coffee at the kitchen table while I try and arrange them artistically. In the end I give up and stick them in a bucket with some water. "I'll do it later."  
  
"It really was yesterday?"  
  
"It really was."  
  
"I'm sorry. I thought it was today."  
  
"No kidding. It doesn't matter."  
  
"Still – "  
  
"Carter, it doesn't matter. I don't like birthdays much."  
  
"Do anything nice?"  
  
"Yeah – we went for a picnic."  
  
"What, a sit outside and eat picnic?"  
  
"By the lake. Hot soup and dancing to the Rolling Stones."  
  
"That a Croatian thing?"  
  
"It's a Luka thing."  
  
"Right." There's a silence; he picks an apple out of the fruit bowl and polishes it on his sleeve; puts it back.  
  
"Help yourself."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Fruit – help yourself. We can afford it and it's good for you."  
  
He laughs a little then. "So – how are you?"  
  
"Bored. Moody, irritable." Another laugh. "It's OK, you can say it."  
  
"What?"  
  
"'No change there then'."  
  
"I wouldn't dare."  
  
"You were thinking it."  
  
"No."  
  
"Sure you were."  
  
A moment's pause. "Yeah. So . . . I wanted to say I'm sorry."  
  
"For what?"  
  
"The crap about you and the baby."  
  
"And Luka. Don't forget Luka."  
  
"Don't forget Luka," he repeats under his breath. "He told you what I said?" He looks uncomfortable now.  
  
"The gist of it."  
  
He nods. "I was out of line."  
  
"Forget it."  
  
"No, I . . . I'm happy for you with all this," and he nods to indicate the house and kitchen, my impressive frontage, "and I know I keep saying that and then screwing up but it's true."  
  
"So why do you?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"Keep screwing up?"  
  
"I don't know. Because you let me?"  
  
"I let you?"  
  
"You chew me out and then forgive me."  
  
"Must be love."  
  
"That's the thing, I think it must." Oh boy, what are we talking about here. "I, er," and he clears his throat, "I've not had a lot of call to use that word, and when I have it's been . . . well it's been narrow."  
  
"Narrow."  
  
"Yeah. I don't even know if I can say I love my parents. I mean, I love them like a kid loves them because they're my parents but as people . . . I don't think . . . they're not very lovable."  
  
"Not like me," I say and immediately regret my flippancy.  
  
"You have your moments" he grins. "Thing is, Abby I do love you. I love you for what you are, you know, for who you are, and it's just taken me a while to see that that doesn't mean that I'm supposed to . . . be in love with you."  
  
"You just now realised this?"  
  
"Pitiful, huh?"  
  
"Well – "  
  
"Pitiful. But you know when I saw it? When you told me that you didn't need me to look out for you, that it was Luka's job and he was doing just fine with it."  
  
"That's all it took?"  
  
"That and everything that went before it."  
  
"Well, you know, we can never have too much love in our lives."  
  
"Ah, the watchword of Kerry Weaver."  
  
"And Robert Romano. You want some more coffee?"  
  
"Sure." The silence that follows is more comfortable and we go on to chat about Christmas which he spent with Jing-Mei's family and couldn't wait to get away which they did the day after to an hotel and holed themselves up there for two days "redefining their boundaries".  
  
"Two days and nights of crazy sex, huh?"  
  
"Yeah. How about you two? I mean . . . I don't mean -"  
  
"Crazy sex? Look at me. Once I'm underway stopping is like halting an oil tanker. My crazy sex days are over for the time being. In fact my crazy sex days are probably over for about the next 5 years."  
  
"Poor Luka."  
  
"Poor me! I was kinda enjoying married sluttiness."  
  
"Lucky Luka."  
  
"He knows it. Hey, look at this." I lead him into the sitting room, cursing as yet another pine needle lodges itself in my foot and I pick up Ivica's picture, holding it in front of my face. "Guess who?"  
  
"Wow."  
  
"It's an original Kovac."  
  
"Luka?"  
  
"Kovac the Elder."  
  
"I didn't know he did portraits."  
  
"I don't think he does much but, you know, I am that pretty and that special."  
  
"Absolutely." he says and of course he doesn't know what it means, what I just said. "What did you get him?"  
  
"Ivica?"  
  
"Luka."  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"Cheapskate."  
  
"We said we weren't going to buy gifts and he sprang this on me."  
  
"Bastard." I look at him sharply then but he's smiling.  
  
"Yeah. I hate him."  
  
"I can tell."  
  
"Ask me about my birthday present."  
  
"What about your birthday present?"  
  
"It's coming all the way from Zagreb and costing thousands of dollars."  
  
"The Croatian Crown Jewels?"  
  
"They don't have crown jewels. Well, I don't think they have crown jewels."  
  
"Then what?"  
  
"A piano, baby grand, badly out of tune and needs polishing."  
  
"You play the piano?"  
  
"Nope. Luka can a little but he's not to touch it."  
  
"I don't get it."  
  
"It was his mother's. His dad was going to have to sell it and I saved the day."  
  
"How much does it cost to ship a piano from Zagreb to Chicago?"  
  
"Not my concern."  
  
"See I was going to say that taking the piano was a sweet thing to do for the old guy and now you've gone and spoiled it."  
  
"Also not my concern. And besides, you love me, right?"  
  
"Right." He goes over to the window and looks out into the godawful dreary greyness of the late morning.  
  
"I'm thinking . . . I'm going to ask Deb . . . I'm going to tell her I want us to find a place together."  
  
"Wow. I thought . . . "  
  
"It's better. I mean once I smacked myself in the face and woke myself up. Love's where you look for it, right? It doesn't beat a path to your door. And I mean, even if it did it might be heavily disguised."  
  
"I think you should leave it there with the metaphor."  
  
"No, no, it's good. Important thing is to open the door and see past the disguise."  
  
"You just said that it doesn't beat a path to your door."  
  
"I did, didn't I. OK, then you have to sit in the rocker on the front porch and watch out for it."  
  
"What if it goes down a different street?"  
  
"You're pissing on my parade here."  
  
"I'm sorry. I know what you're saying. I mean, I can look back and see turning points, landmarks, you know, when if I'd done something different it would have changed things totally. Some of them are open door moments."  
  
"Are we for real, talking like this?"  
  
"You started it."  
  
"See that's why I love you."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I talk crap and you talk it right back."  
  
"Hey, I'm an Earth Mother now, you can't talk to me like that."  
  
"Not yet you're not. How's that going?"  
  
"Good."  
  
"Liar."  
  
"I feel like shit."  
  
"No signs of anything yet?"  
  
"Couple of contractions but they never amount to much."  
  
"You've got a few days left yet. No rush."  
  
"You try living with 30lb of live eels strapped to you and tell me that."  
  
"You want it over?"  
  
"Yeah. And no. I don't know."  
  
"You scared?"  
  
"Only when I think about it."  
  
"Which is . . . "  
  
"All the time."  
  
He nods. "What are you scared of?"  
  
"Everything, nothing. This is a person, I'm going to be its mother. Mother isn't a word with a whole lot of good associations for me."  
  
"Abby – "  
  
"You know, you should meet Luka's dad. He'd kick you into shape in no time. Did it for me. He's hell on wheels the old bastard but he knows a bit about life. Use it or lose it."  
  
"That what you're doing?"  
  
"You bet. I'm scared shitless Carter but I've never felt so alive in my life. It's better than drink. You should go talk to Deb and just, you know, go for it, stop thinking about it, stop – "  
  
"– being the guy whose brother died and who has useless parents and who got stabbed and stole drugs at work and turned himself into a squalid junkie."  
  
"Not quite what I was going to say."  
  
"I'm sort of channelling my Grandmother here. "  
  
"She said that?"  
  
"Not exactly; something like it."  
  
"Think she'd be interested in an elderly Croatian widower with paint down his fingernails and a dirty laugh?"  
  
"Wouldn't that make Luka my . . . uncle or something?"  
  
"Hey, I'd be your aunt! How cool would that be?"  
  
"I think I've heard enough."  
  
"You'd have some cool cousins too – Anna's a beauty and if you can wait a few years – "  
  
"OK, I understand that you want to get in practice for the post partum crazies but this is creeping me out."  
  
"No, I think it's a good plan. This way we get into your will, right?"  
  
"See now you're talking crap back at me without me talking it to you first."  
  
"I win!"  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
January 12th,  
  
Cold. Cloudy. Freezing wind. Ominous twinges for about half an hour and then nothing but my back aches like a sonofabitch.  
  
I can't get to the table to eat, I can hardly move, but it doesn't stop me washing all the clothes we got at the shower and from my mom and the grandmothers. Again. I've made up the crib, stacked the diapers, opened the nursery window a little for fresh air, can't settle, feel like I'm on hot coals. Everything is ready. Even me. I think. Carter's flowers are still in the bucket. Luka hasn't mentioned them.  
  
January 13th  
  
"Sonofabitch."  
  
"I don't think that's going to work. I mean how far do you think you're going to get before you're saying that?"  
  
"OK then how about foley? Ten blade?"  
  
"You want to confuse the staff?"  
  
"What if I just grab you by the throat and threaten you with violence?"  
  
"You might want to do that anyway."  
  
We've been at this half an hour now. I want a "surrender" word, something only we know and that I can scream at him and he'll know I've had it with the whole natural childbirth thing, no arguing, no "You only asked me twice" just action and fast. "You've seen more births than I have, what is a woman least likely to say?"  
  
"I don't know. 'How about a blow job before the next contraction.' I don't think I ever heard that."  
  
"Could work. I'd have to try not to take you at your word."  
  
"I can't think about this any more. Make me some tea?"  
  
"Sure. And how about I do something with Carter's flowers? That bucket isn't doing a lot for them."  
  
"How do you know they're from Carter?"  
  
"Who else? Besides, they're in a bucket." He gets as far as the hallway when the 'phone rings; I can hear it's from Croatia and after a few minutes he comes back to get me and he's grinning and I'm grinning back because we've got it. In triumphant unison we say "Ivica!"  
  
......................................................................................................  
  
I've been thinking about stuff, a lot of stuff. All those things I looked back on and I realise suddenly that I'm not doing that so much. I feel like everything's opened up in front of me, like I have a future and instead of being terrified I'm excited. Don't get me wrong, I'm scared too but . . . I don't know how I can explain. All that stuff before – I don't feel like it was ever about me, not really. It was my mom, my dad leaving, my mom some more, Richard – it was all stuff that happened to me like some crazy soap opera script writer was thinking stuff up, stuff to torture me with. I think if I'd found out I had an evil twin who had been plotting my downfall from her secure hospital ward somewhere in Argentina before making good her escape disguised as a face-lift patient covered in bandages I might actually have felt better, it would have made more sense.  
  
Now – now I feel like I'm writing the script myself. Well, sort of. Maybe I'm a consultant producer. Except I don't really want a script, you know. I mean, I know what happens on the last page, I get killed off and no- one's going to wake up and find me in their shower any time soon after that. It's OK; I don't want sneak previews of what happens up to then, but at least I know I'll be playing other parts. Wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend. Was a time when I had to be just one of those at a time but shit, my repertoire's expanded and I can play them all together. I don't have to learn lines or know what side of the stage to walk on, or hit my mark because Matt Roush isn't watching and I can improvise if I want and dry and corpse because I have a very good supporting cast and a world class leading man.  
  
A world class leading man whose head is an inch or two away from mine as he sleeps. He looks younger when he's sleeping, maybe we all do. He told me once that I look like Jasna when I sleep. He's a quiet sleeper. After getting home at noon he has to go back to work tonight, has to cover for Pratt who has put his back out I don't know how. So I came up here and lay next to him to watch him sleep and think about stuff. I'll have to wake him in a minute or two so he can shower and shave and dress and head off into the dark again. This sucks.  
  
"Hey". Nothing. "Hey, wake up, it's eight thirty. Luka." Ah, movement at last. Except all he does is inch a little closer and rest a hand on me. "Luka."  
  
"I know."  
  
"If you want to eat before you leave – "  
  
"I don't want to eat before I leave." His eyes flicker open. "Did you cook?"  
  
"Hell no."  
  
His eyes close again. "Another five minutes."  
  
"Want to fool around?"  
  
He laughs then without opening his eyes. "With you?"  
  
"No, with Professor Mrs Backhaus."  
  
"I'd stand more of a chance."  
  
"Actually you'd stand more of a chance with Robin."  
  
"And he can cook." Still, his mouth is on my neck, his hair tickling my face.  
  
"Stop that, it's going nowhere." He stops and I regret it. He sighs and turns onto his back, eyes open now.  
  
"Three days to go."  
  
"Could be longer."  
  
"This kid's a Kovac, we're punctual."  
  
"Half Wyczinski. We're not."  
  
"Fair point." He turns his head on the pillow to look at me, his eyes soft. "You OK?"  
  
"I'm good."  
  
"I'm not talking about your blood pressure."  
  
"Neither am I."  
  
"Come here." I wriggle closer and lay my head on his shoulder, listening to the clock ticking, his heart beating, feeling his hands on my hair. "When Dani was pregnant, toward the end, I never knew when she was going to be excited and when she was going to be absolutely terrified. Me, I was just excited. Too stupid to be terrified I guess. She was more of a realist than me."  
  
"What about now? You more of a realist?"  
  
"I don't know. But I'm terrified. And excited and grateful."  
  
"I don't like the sound of grateful."  
  
"Thankful then, is that better?"  
  
"Better."  
  
He's quiet for a moment or two, heartbeat, clock ticking, and then he says "You know, don't you, that there'll be no-one there except us, you and me."  
  
"Do I?"  
  
"I don't know. That's why I'm asking." I don't answer and he sighs. "Well, there'll be no-one else there for me." I twist my head upwards so that I can look at him. "Believe me?"  
  
"I don't know. How can you be sure?"  
  
"Because I have to be. Because I have a second chance and it's more than a lot of people get. Because I want to be sure, because I want this, I want this with you. Because we've earned it. I'm sure because I can be. I'm still standing, Abby, after everything, and it's what matters, maybe all that matters. Life, you know? It's taken me a long time but I'm in the middle of it all again and it feels so good sometimes that I could cry. We're in it together and together is a word I didn't think I'd ever use again."  
  
It's not a word I ever thought I'd use at all but I don't say so. "I love you", that's something I can say and know what it means and be glad to say it and be glad that it makes him smile and his hold on me tightens a little and he says "I know." 


	23. Part 22

Part 22  
  
His body completely covers mine, I can feel him inside me and my breath is catching in my throat with the urgency of it. But there's another feeling too, one I try to ignore and I can't. "Luka, I have to pee." And it's all gone, evaporating at the sound of my voice and I'm alone in our bed, a warm glow between my legs and I hurl his pillow across the room with a howl of frustration. I don't need to look at the clock to know it's 4.00 am. "Sonofa godamnedfuckingbitch!" For a crazy moment I'm tempted to empty my bladder right there, knowing the water proof under the sheet that we put on I case my water broke in the night would deal with it. "Yeah, that works," I say to myself aloud "because then you'd only have to change the sheets instead of dragging your gigantic lazy ass ten feet to the bathroom."  
  
My feet are cold as I sit on the toilet, eyes closed. I wonder if I can just go back to sleep right here and pick up that dream where I left off. Better still, pick it up at the beginning. God knows it's probably the nearest I'm going to get to sex for . . . ever. I ache all over, like someone kicked me. The flow stops and I reach for the paper but there's something weird going on here. The sound of water trickling into the toilet goes on. And on. Oh, shit.. Okay, Abby, just take it easy here. A glance into the toilet shows nothing untoward and the paper I drag between my legs comes away smeared pink. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Take it easy, take it easy. I'm shaking and it's nothing to do with the cold. Back to our bed, sit down, deep breath. I get myself arranged with underwear and a pad for the slow trickle which is still leaving me and head downstairs with my bag that's been packed for weeks and then I head right back upstairs because I realise I'm not dressed. I'm still aching but there's nothing else, not yet. I want to put on layers and layers of clothes but I don't because I'm only going to have to take them off soon. Soon.  
  
I don't call him right away but make tea and toast which I eat and then throw right back up again. As I'm rinsing out the kitchen sink a slow dull ache spreads up across my belly, around my back and down my thighs, fading slowly away. Well, that wasn't so bad. 4.27 am. I don't need to get to the hospital until the pain stops me in my tracks and for now I settle myself on the couch with the 'phone and listen to the silence. I'm totally calm and a warm excitement has me in its grip, knowing that I'm here and this is happening and no-one else knows.  
  
"You ready for this?" I ask aloud, my hand resting on my front. "I am. You don't know this and one day it may come as a surprise to you but we should get off on the right foot and as I have this whole born again honesty thing going on here I have to tell you that I'm a little surprised by that myself. Still, while we're being honest here I'm also pissed that you couldn't hang in there another 8 hours until your dad got back from work." I stop here as another contraction, just as slow, just as gentle, works its way over me. 4.47am. So far so good. The next one makes my toes curl a little. Ninety minutes and five contractions later and if I were making tracks I think I might be stopping in them and I dial the hospital. I don't recognise the voice on the other end of the 'phone.  
  
"Emergency Room."  
  
"Dr. Kovac, please."  
  
"Is this about a patient?"  
  
"No, this is personal."  
  
"He's busy right now."  
  
"It is very important that you tell him I'm calling." Shit, here comes another.  
  
"And you would be?"  
  
"I would be Mrs. Kovac and I would also be in labour."  
  
"Mrs. Kovac? His wife?"  
  
"No, I'm his mother!" Jesus, that one hurt. "Just get him!" I hang up the 'phone and try to steady myself. Things are as they should be, Luka is no more than twenty minutes away if the idiot on the desk finds him. I consider calling again but there's no hurry. "We're doing fine" I tell my unborn who doesn't answer. 6.10 am; some people will be getting up, heading for the shower, slotting Pop Tarts in the toaster, peering out at the freezing weather. And here am I on my own, maybe the last time I'll ever really be on my own in my life and suddenly I want my mom. As soon as she picks up the 'phone she says  
  
"Abby?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Where are you?"  
  
"Home, waiting for Luka."  
  
"It's started?"  
  
"Couple hours ago. Starting to hurt now." In the space of a few seconds I remember all the times I was irritated by the yells and moans of women I helped to deliver, all the times I got bored by it all and I send up a silent little prayer for forgiveness.  
  
"So where's Luka? He should be with you!"  
  
"He was working, he's on his way if the moron on the ER desk has managed to track him down."  
  
"Abby, call an ambulance."  
  
"Mom, I'm fine, there's no hurry."  
  
"You sure? It's better to be safe than sorry, these things can move faster than you expect. You remember Marge Schiller, first baby, three hours start to finish – "  
  
"Mom, I know what I'm doing. If things speed up I'll call an ambulance but in any case Luka will be here any minute and I'll be in good hands."  
  
"God, Abby you know I'll be thinking about you until I hear. I could come over – "  
  
"From Minnesota? On a bus?"  
  
"I'll fly, I can do it, I'll make myself do it – "  
  
"Maggie, listen to me. There is no need, there's no problem here, don't freak out on me. Call Eric and I'll make sure Luka calls you with progress reports, OK?"  
  
"You're sure?"  
  
"I promise." I hear Luka's key in the lock and cut her off with more promises of blow by blow accounts of my progress. He's wearing his lab coat, needs a shave.  
  
"Where's your coat?"  
  
"What? I'm wearing it."  
  
"Your overcoat."  
  
"Don't need it."  
  
"You're crazy, it's freezing out there."  
  
He ignores this wifely concern and kneels in front of me, taking my wrist. "How far apart?"  
  
"Between fifteen and twenty minutes as far as I can tell."  
  
"Fifteen or twenty?"  
  
"Started at twenty now it's fifteen."  
  
"How's the pain?"  
  
"Oh, that's coming along nicely."  
  
"Membrane ruptured?"  
  
"About four o'clock ."  
  
"Okay." He seems to hesitate.  
  
"What is it?"  
  
"There's something I have to do. Won't take long."  
  
"Now?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"You might want to stay with me for the next couple of minutes."  
  
"Another?" I nod and he sits beside me, holding my hand. "Done? Good, well done."  
  
"You know this is a piece of cake, I don't know what all the fuss is about."  
  
"Tell me that again in about ten hours."  
  
"Go and do what you have to do, I don't want to be here much longer."  
  
He leaves me and is back in a couple of minutes with a sheaf of papers which he balls up one by one, putting them in the fire grate and then he puts a match to them and watches as they burn. The notes, the pages and pages of notes which haunted me in the summer, up in smoke. When they're all turned to ash he stands up and turns to me. "Done." I don't know what to say back so I just nod and my eyes drift to the grey fragments rimmed with glowing orange edges in the grate. Done. I look back at him and hold out my hand because the pain's back. He sits by me one hand holding mine, the other resting on my belly. As it passes he says "Strong."  
  
"Tell me about it."  
  
"Twelve minutes. We should go. You ready?"  
  
"What kind of a question is that?"  
  
"Your bag."  
  
"Oh, right, over there."  
  
He takes my wrist again almost by reflex.  
  
"You can stop with the doctor stuff now."  
  
"Sorry."  
  
"And don't apologise. Actually, yes, apologise because I'm not going to be feeling real forgiving later." He helps me into my coat and then, for a long moment, he holds me, strokes my hair and kisses me in a way that makes me remember my dream; and then he says "Show time." ...................................................................................................... 


	24. Part 23 finale

Well, here's the final chapter; very many thanks to those of you who have stuck with this to the bitter end and thanks too for the reviews both positive and critical (even Mandarin – in those moments when I feel I may not be in my right mind I remember your reviews and feel reassured of my own sanity), they're all encouraging because it tells me that you've bothered to read this at all!  
  
And can I urge those of you who haven't already done so to read Californiagirl's parallel story (Once More With Feeling) told from Luka's POV; it's been an intriguing experiment because we're very different both as writers and, sometimes, in our take on these characters. This was CAGirl's first fic and kudos to her!  
  
So, thanks again for reading – enjoy!  
  
PART 23  
  
It's cold in the car and I can't hold his hand while he's driving but when the lights change he takes mine and holds it quietly. As they turn to green a contraction starts up and he waits until it passes and curses the driver behind us who sounds his horn when we don't move.  
  
"Someone's in a hurry" I say as the lights turn red again. He answers me in Croatian, looking daggers in the rear view mirror. The horn sounds again. "Maybe someone's having a baby" I crack and he laughs this time.  
  
"Hi, I'm Maggie, I'll be taking care of you but only for the next half hour or so. There'll be someone new along then." Maggie. Perfect. She's chirpy and man do I not need chirpy. I'm about to ask if I can see the specials for today but think better of it. "Okay, er . . . "and she looks at the chart, "Abigail – "  
  
"Abby."  
  
"Abby, let's get out of our things and into a gown so we can be checked over."  
  
"We?" I mouth at Luka who responds with a smile of oceanic calm. This could be a very long half hour. She makes to help me but I tell her we've got it thanks very much.  
  
"Okay, fine, I'll be right back." As the door closes behind her Luka sighs. "Don't say anything," he warns, "she'll be gone soon."  
  
"She talked like a waitress."  
  
"She'll be gone soon."  
  
"Maybe I should tell her I used to do her job."  
  
"She'll be – "  
  
"Gone soon, I get it." He's kneeling, taking the shoes from my feet. He has lovely hair. "You have lovely hair." He shakes his head and laughs softly without looking up.  
  
"You too." He stands up now, arms braced either side of me. "This is going to be hard enough without picking fights with the staff."  
  
"I didn't."  
  
"Just remember – "  
  
"She'll be gone soon."  
  
But here she is, blood pressure, temperature, urine sample, prodding, hand between my legs. He looks away instinctively. I feel I ought to tell him that privacy and dignity are going to be in pretty short supply around here soon so I love him for that gesture and all of a rush I'm reminded of when I asked for a gown when he and Susan examined Brian's handiwork and he turned his back. Was that really me?  
  
"Four centimetres. Making our way through the foothills here." She hooks me up to the monitor and the room is filled with the insistent woosh woosh woosh of the baby's heartbeat. "Looking good, all systems go" and she actually gives me the thumbs up. I look at him and he looks back steadily and shakes his head almost imperceptibly.  
  
"Well, thanks for bringing her up here doctor . . . "and she stoops to look at his ID ". . . . Kovac but we've got it from here."  
  
"I'm staying."  
  
"What?"  
  
"My name is Kovac too," I point out with enough emphasis to show her how she mangled his name. She looks at the chart, chewing on her pen. Just swallow it already.  
  
"So you're the father? "  
  
"So far just the husband," he corrects her, "for the next few hours anyway."  
  
"I see. So, you know the drill then."  
  
"Me too" I say as she seems to have forgotten that I'm here.  
  
"First baby."  
  
"First one on this end of proceedings."  
  
"I don't – "  
  
"OB nurse, ER nurse, sometime med student." She looks a little shocked. "How about you? I don't recognise you from when I worked here."  
  
"Agency."  
  
"Ah." She notices my change of expression and steps aside, motioning Luka to take my hand. When the pain passes she chirrups "Okey dokey, boys and girls, we'll just keep an eye on how things are moving along for the next couple hours. Things can slow down sometimes after the – but you know all this. You have a birth plan?" I'm about to hand it over when a voice from the door calls "I'll take that!" and I could almost cry with relief when I recognise Veronica who's help deliver more babies than I've had Jack Daniels.  
  
"Okay Maggie you can go, I've got it from here." Maggie doesn't look sorry to go. "You know Abby if this is a Mystery Customer thing they goofed, they should've sent you to Mercy. Those prosthetic ankles are a pretty crappy disguise, I recognised you right off. You brought your own doctor I see" Veronica continues with a wink.  
  
"I almost never leave home without him."  
  
"I don't blame you," she says under her breath as she bends over me to check my pulse, "I wouldn't let him out of my sight for long either," and then, to him, "You might want to lose the lab coat, dad, it'll confuse the staff."  
  
"Sure." Meekly he removes it.  
  
"You had breakfast?"  
  
"No."  
  
"You should go and get some before things warm up in here. I don't want you fainting on us. Coburn takes no prisoners, she'll just step right over your useless carcass."  
  
"I'm fine."  
  
She looks at me and says so that only I can hear "I'll say" and then continues for his benefit "Well how about we go through this piece of fantasy and wish fulfilment first then." She's holding my birth plan up between thumb and forefinger. Luka nods and sits in the chair at my bedside.  
  
"So, no Fentanyl or narcotics of any kind."  
  
"Under any circumstances." I tell her.  
  
"Can I ask why?"  
  
"I want my wits about me."  
  
"Oh, good answer. Seen too many spaced out moms, huh? Still the spaced out baby can make sure you get some rest that first night. OK. Next - no epidural."  
  
"For preference, but . . . " Luka says, glancing at me.  
  
"OK."  
  
"You're not going to try and talk me out of that?"  
  
"You won't need me to talk you out of it. If you can't stand it any longer you'll know better than anyone." She holds her hand out to Luka. "C'mon, give."  
  
"Give what?"  
  
"The whale song tapes."  
  
"No whale song."  
  
"Vivaldi, Gregorian Chant, Ambient Chillout?"  
  
"Nope."  
  
"Nothing?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"Jesus, you're really going back to basics here, aren't you? Maybe I should boil some water and get clean towels, find you a bullet to bite on. Will you be wanting to take the placenta home so you can bury it someplace by the light of the full moon?"  
  
"You know I think we'll pass on that one."  
  
"Good decision. The music's a mixed blessing. We had Celine Dion all night last night."  
  
"Kelly?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"The mother's name."  
  
"Yeah, I think. Kind of an idiot. Screamed her fool head off all the way through even after the epidural."  
  
"What did she have?"  
  
"A boy. Leonardo."  
  
"Very cultured" I say, surprised.  
  
"More DiCaprio than Da Vinci. She has a Titanic fixation bigger than the goddamned iceberg." She chatters on for a few minutes, I reassure her that I have my surrender word and that if Luka has to leave I'll make sure she knows it.  
  
"You're on?" she asks, surprised.  
  
"No. I'll be here."  
  
I'm actually thankful that a contraction interrupts things at this point and disappointed that it feels weaker than the others.  
  
"We'll keep an eye on things for a while but if we have to give things a little kick in the ass . . . "  
  
"Last resort" I say.  
  
"You got it. Look, Luka, I was serious about the breakfast, go and eat, take a shower, you'll feel better. You just worked a shift, right, and it's hotter than hell in here, so even if you don't feel better for the shower we will. Go while you have chance." He doesn't argue with her but looks at me and I smile my approval. As the door closes behind him she turns to me. "Well, just look at you. We heard you got yourself hitched to a doctor."  
  
"If you can't be one marry one" I crack.  
  
"Not a bad choice either."  
  
"I've made worse decisions."  
  
"I'll bet. This his first baby too?"  
  
"No. He had, er, he had a couple of kids before, back in Croatia."  
  
"They with their mom?"  
  
"Kind of."  
  
"Kind of?"  
  
"They're buried together."  
  
"Jesus."  
  
"It's OK. Just . . . keep an eye on him. I might be kinda busy here."  
  
"Sure, not a problem. Keeping my eyes on him I mean, not a problem at all. How about keeping my hands on him too?"  
  
"You know that's kind of low."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Hitting on the husband of a woman in labour."  
  
"Nah, low is when they hit back!!"  
  
7.50 am  
  
"You feel better?"  
  
"I felt fine before."  
  
"But you ate?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
"Liar."  
  
"I got coffee."  
  
"On an empty stomach and no sleep. Keep working on that ulcer."  
  
"What? That's not real coffee."  
  
"I don't think your duodenum is going to make the distinction."  
  
"I don't remember covering this in med school."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Early stages of labour characterised by nagging."  
  
"I am immune to criticism. I am embarking on a life changing, character building rite of passage connecting me to millions of women down through the ages since the dawn of time."  
  
"I thought I told you not to read Kitzinger." He glances at the monitor. "Feel that?"  
  
"Oh yeah." These pains are starting to bite.  
  
"OK?"  
  
"OK."  
  
"What's that, ten minutes?"  
  
"This time. They're not so regular, I think maybe they're slowing down."  
  
"Not for long."  
  
"I don't want speeding up. I've seen it, I don't want it."  
  
"Don't worry, I've got your back."  
  
"Promise? I mean I know you doctors, you'll want to be home in time for dinner, right?"  
  
"No-one to cook it."  
  
"Take out."  
  
He shrugs. "I'll order pizza. Pepperoni good with you?"  
  
"Sure. With anchovies. "  
  
10.20 am  
  
"Trench warfare."  
  
"What?"  
  
"It's like trench warfare. One of the British war poets wrote something about how it was days and days of tedium and boredom broken up by episodes of extreme terror and pain. I didn't realise how boring this is. I mean I always had other things to do before."  
  
He runs through the options: TV, radio, are there any calls I want to make? No, no and no. "So, maybe we can fit in a game of Scrabble between contractions, huh?"  
  
"Shut up, Luka."  
  
11.10 am  
  
"Six centimetres. Slowing down a little."  
  
"I don't want – "  
  
"I know, don't worry, no need to panic yet."  
  
"I promised my mom we'd call, let her know how things are going. Do it for me?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
He reaches for the phone. "Outside. If she hears the monitor or I start up again she'll want to speak to me. I can't do that."  
  
"What do you want me to tell her?"  
  
"Just tell her I'm doing fine, all going according to plan."  
  
"I'll send Veronica in."  
  
While he's gone Veronica checks me over again, I tell her I'm bored, she tells me to make the most of bored because soon bored is going to be looking pretty damned good. The door opens and there's Carter.  
  
"Hey."  
  
"Word gets around."  
  
"Where's Luka?" I don't like the edge in his voice.  
  
"He's calling my mom."  
  
"Huh. I'm covering the end of his shift, I'd be a little pissed if he was home sleeping." He perches on the edge of the bed. "So, we having fun?"  
  
"It's a lot of laughs. I don't know why I didn't do it sooner."  
  
Veronica giggles. "I'll be back." When she's gone Carter says "So how's it going really?"  
  
"He's fine."  
  
There's a pause which lasts a split second too long. "I meant you."  
  
"I already told you, I'm good. Oh crap."  
  
Carter reaches for my hand but I snatch it away. "Trust me, I'm a doctor." He grabs my hand and holds on while I breath through it. "You're a natural." he says, putting my hand very deliberately back down on the bed as Luka gets back. He stops for a second, seeing what he sees. "Did I miss anything?"  
  
"Olympic class Lamaze performance going on in here" Carter says getting up. He shoves his hands in the pockets of his lab coat and rocks on his heels a little.  
  
"Thanks for covering my shift." This is without doubt Luka for "Get the fuck out of here, Carter" but Carter isn't fluent in Kovac and grins back.  
  
"You owe me."  
  
"Sure."  
  
"Well, I, er, I just wanted to see how things were going with the earth mother. I'll be watching for the white smoke and then we can send up some of our own." He stands for a second longer and then Luka opens the door for him.  
  
"Give 'em your best in the ER?"  
  
"Sure. I'd send postcards but, you know . . . "  
  
"Yeah." Still he hovers.  
  
"'Bye, Carter. Thanks for the cover again." Luka's voice is tight, his arm is at Carter's back and he more or less pushes him out of the place. Luka gives it a second before saying "He OK?"  
  
"I guess. I can't say I'm real concerned with him right now." He nods. "What did he mean about the smoke?"  
  
"Cigars. He gave them to me months ago. Probably cost more than the GDP of a small African country."  
  
"What do you have there?"  
  
"I got you these."  
  
Cheap gossip magazines. "You? Are perfection."  
  
"I aim to please."  
  
"You aim pretty well."  
  
12.20 pm  
  
"She lost 60 pounds? In three weeks?"  
  
"It's what it says here."  
  
"It's a lie."  
  
"I don't know. I'm planning on losing about 25 pounds in the next twelve hours."  
  
"So, only another two days of the same and you'll have broken her record."  
  
"You think these things pay well for stories?"  
  
"What, are you thinking of the college fund?"  
  
"I'm thinking of your mother's piano."  
  
"I'm pretty sure they don't pay that well. Nobody pays that well."  
  
1.15 pm  
  
"Can I take a walk?"  
  
"Sure." Veronica helps me up and unhooks the monitor. The peace which follows is blissful. We walk down the hall, Veronica following me and Luka who holds on to me when the contraction comes, the top of my head pushed against him. When I look up at him he looks anxious. "You OK?"  
  
"I'm fine. Is this helping? The walking?" I consider for a moment.  
  
"No. You know this is not as easy as I'm making it look."  
  
"You want to go back to bed?"  
  
"Could you just go in there and slap some paint on the wall first?"  
  
"I'm sorry?"  
  
"That colour is driving me crazy."  
  
Chuny and Haleh. Susan. Jing Mei. Elizabeth. Kerry. Frank for God's sake, even Frank – they all call, a stream of messages from the desk clerk.  
  
"Should have sold tickets" Luka says under his breath.  
  
Right about three in the afternoon things start to speed up. The room is getting on my very last nerve, all pinks and apricots and why did I never notice how crappy the pictures on the walls in here are before? I beg Veronica to turn off the sound on the monitor because it's like torture. More torture.  
  
"My feet are cold."  
  
"Did you bring socks?" Veronica asks.  
  
"In the bag."  
  
Before she can get them he's moved to the bottom of the bed and is chafing my feet between his hands to warm them. It's a whole lot better than socks.  
  
"Nice paint job on the nails" he says with a smile.  
  
"Yeah, well, I know this guy."  
  
"He's good."  
  
"He's cheap. Cute too."  
  
"Cheap and cute?" Veronica asks. "Is he gay? He must be gay if he works in a salon."  
  
"No stereotype left unturned," Luka murmurs.  
  
"Ah, no, he's not gay. But he's very exclusive."  
  
"You're not leaving here without giving me his number."  
  
I look him in the eye. "Sure."  
  
3.15 pm  
  
"You hungry?"  
  
"A little. More tired than hungry."  
  
"Go get something to eat."  
  
"There are what, three minutes between contractions now? How fast do you think I can move? Or eat?"  
  
"Veronica will stay with me. I'll be fine."  
  
"I know."  
  
He stays put.  
  
3.45 pm  
  
"This is a nightmare."  
  
"I know."  
  
"You don't know, you have no idea. Jesus fucking Christ. I can't do this any more, I want to go home."  
  
"You can't do that, not this time, this you have to see through."  
  
"I can't."  
  
"Abby, open your eyes, look at me."  
  
"Please, Luka, let me go home, I don't know what I'm doing here."  
  
"Come on, look at me. Sixty seconds, that's all, keep looking, keep your eyes open, don't hold your breath, thirty seconds, nearly done, stay with me, breathe, 10, 9, 8 . . . good, that's good . . . "It passes, I want to cry. He pushes my hair back, kisses my forehead.  
  
"Luka."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Next time I say I want to do this the natural way?"  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"Ignore me."  
  
He nods; "Next time."  
  
"What time is it?"  
  
"After four, dark already. I think it's trying to snow." He's quiet, stroking my hand. Veronica has been sitting quietly in the corner, waiting, but even she has to pee so we're alone for the moment. These moments are getting shorter and shorter, tiny little patches of blue sky in the relentless fucking downpour of pain and struggle, a gap of one, maybe two minutes and fuck, almost worse than the pain because I'm just waiting for the next one to hit.  
  
Trench warfare. Right.  
  
You think life's a bitch? Let me tell you it has nothing on this. I should have thought about it when I got to about 24 weeks because the truth is there comes a point when you have to go through with it, where there's no backing out, he's right, and it's the only thing in my whole life I couldn't change my mind about. Career, marriage, men, drink – I could wriggle out of all of them but there's no escape from this and I see now that there hasn't been for months. I guess that's when your mind finally goes, when you start putting pans away in the refrigerator and cheese in the dishwasher and forgetting people's names. Mother nature's way of distracting your attention so you go through with it. She's a nasty, sneaky old bitch, Mother Nature. He looks at me and smiles, and the wave of panic I can feel building ebbs a little. If I'm trapped he's trapped right here with me because I know nothing, nothing in the world would make him leave.  
  
"OK?"  
  
"Apart from the indescribable agony?"  
  
"Apart from that."  
  
"I guess." It is a guess - I think I've kind of lost any sense of perspective here. "You?"  
  
"Don't worry about me."  
  
"I do."  
  
"Don't, I'm fine."  
  
"I'm so tired."  
  
"I know." He looks at me nervously, strokes my hair. "Any sign of my dad? I mean, time's running out if he's going to show up."  
  
"I think he's going to stand me up."  
  
"Typical."  
  
"Luka."  
  
"Already?"  
  
This one is a real bitch and then I barely have time to recover before he's telling me again to breathe, to keep my eyes on him, to breathe, to breathe and go ahead and yell if I want to.  
  
"Pressure . . . " I grunt.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Pressure you idiot!"  
  
"I'll get Veronica."  
  
"Don't go!" He hits the call button and as he's standing at the head of the bed I grab him around the waist and hold on as the pain starts up again.  
  
"Abby . . . Abby, I can't breath, you have to let go." I hang on but then I feel hands uncurling my arms and Veronica is telling me to let go and open my eyes, counting me down. As the contraction ends she examines me again and tells me she's going for Coburn and not to go anywhere. Funny.  
  
"Christ let this be over soon. I don't know what I'm doing any more. Can't you make it stop?"  
  
"No, I can't, this is you now. It will be finished soon, you're nearly there."  
  
"Fucking doctors." Hah, it was actually fucking doctors well, fucking this doctor, that got me here. I'm so tired. " Whose stupid idea was it to do this anyway? I hate this."  
  
"I know. You want to sit up a little more?"  
  
"No."  
  
"OK, come on then." He pulls me upright. The room suddenly seems very full as Veronica returns with Coburn who has a student in tow and would I mind if he observed? Right now I don't care if the Chicago Symphony Orchestra wants to observe as long as I can hold on to Luka and get this over and done with.  
  
"Ten centimetres, ready when you are." There's something hugely reassuring about the sound of Janet Coburn's voice. It crosses my mind that if I could choose I'd like a Janet Coburn for a mom.  
  
Luka bends close and says "So . . . about that blow job . . ." Three pairs of eyes snap upwards towards us, eyebrows synchronised in shock. Luka grins and I actually giggle. "Don't make me laugh, you bastard."  
  
"Er . . . Okay, Abby, next contraction I want you to put your chin down, take a deep breath – "  
  
"It's OK, I know what to do, my husband's a doctor." And I manage a smile for him.  
  
And I've never wanted to just look at him so badly before. In that moment I'm afraid of this baby, afraid of what it will do to us, afraid that someone else will get those looks he gives just to me, that he's giving me now, in these last moments when it's just me and him.  
  
He's afraid too, I can see it. A father, he'll be a father and it's not the same thing as being my lover or my husband and me being a mother isn't the same as me being his wife and right there I know it's the same fear that would be there if he'd never done this before, if this was the first time.  
  
The first time.  
  
Jesus, this is the first time for us, me and him, and I want to tell him that I see it now, that I know he was right when he said it would just be us here but the pain steals my voice. Suddenly he smiles, a smile of such brilliance that I want to laugh but I feel the tears come to my eyes instead because I think he saw the understanding in my eyes, I think he saw that; then the smile's gone from his face but it's like it's still there in the air between us. Veronica breaks the moment telling me to pull my thighs up toward me; Luka braces himself against one foot, she against the other and they hold a hand each and she says "You go, girl, show 'em how it's done." I want to laugh. Oh, God, of all the ridiculous, desperate things to be doing. Yeah, this is life changing alright.  
  
Coburn is telling us we have a girl, he says no, he doesn't want to cut the cord and she's heavy as she lies on me before they take her to check her over. He glances over as they work, draws in his breath sharply as she cries and then turns back to me, kissing my face and telling me that he's pretty sure her ears are tiny and pink not long and furry so there go dreams as prophecy then. Veronica says she's the Spinal Tap of babies with an APGAR of 12 and the student giggles but Coburn obviously doesn't understand .They weigh her and tag her and wrap her and bring her back to me, her head still smeared and a little bloody. She fights her arms free of the blanket and pulls them up to her face and I take in that she has long fingers and a shock of black hair and she goes straight back to sleep. He holds her while I'm cleaned up and then they leave us alone, the three of us.  
  
"So how did I do?" My voice is hoarse from straining.  
  
"What do you think?" His accent is thick with emotion.  
  
"Not bad for a beginner I guess."  
  
He nods, looks at me intently like he's trying to commit me to memory. "And how are you doing now?"  
  
"I don't know, I never did this before. I think I'm doing okay. I'm glad it's over." Except of course it's not, it's just started, God help me, but he keeps that to himself.  
  
"You did great. I'm so proud of you."  
  
"I'm tired." Truth is I can't remember my name and I don't know what day or year it is or who the president might be and I'm pretty lucky they don't do spot psych consults in here.  
  
"Why don't you get some sleep while you can?" he says. He has to call Maggie and Ivica and Tatijana and go down to the ER with the news. Obviously exhausted too and in need of a shave, his face is scratchy against mine when he leans in to kiss me. I grab hold of him then, just wanting to be close. He laughs softly. "You did it."  
  
"We did it."  
  
"Yeah. We did it."  
  
"Don't go yet."  
  
"No. "And he holds me then as the snow falls outside with the lights turned down low in the room.  
  
I've been asleep, that much is obvious. For a moment or two I wonder where I am. I feel like someone has smashed me between the legs with a baseball bat and then I remember. I did it.  
  
He doesn't know I'm watching him. He has her balanced on his forearms and he's just staring at her, staring, staring, staring. He seems very still and he's not saying anything but every line of his face and body is speaking out loud, and they're speaking of happiness. And then, without taking his eyes from her he says "Hey, mom." How did he know I was awake?  
  
"Hey." Now he looks at me. And he smiles.  
  
"You've really gone and done it this time."  
  
"I guess. She sleeping?"  
  
"Yeah. She's had a busy day, she's as tired as you are."  
  
"I really don't think so."  
  
He gets up, very sure, very relaxed, more certain, more complete than I've ever seen him, a whole new Luka, everything he should be, and he perches on the edge of the bed, Rosa's head resting in his hand. My daughter. Jesus.  
  
"She's . . . lovely" he says softly, his voice a smile. The smell of Carter's cigars is clinging faintly to him and it's an odd masculine thing in this low lit softly coloured place.  
  
"Look at all that hair. She's a Kovac."  
  
"Rosa, this is your mother. She is without doubt the bravest woman you will ever meet in your life."  
  
"You should listen to your father because he's absolutely right. Except when he's wrong. Will I love her?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"I don't – not now."  
  
"You don't know her."  
  
"You look like you love her."  
  
"You'll love her. Pretty hard to love the truck that just ran you over, huh?"  
  
"I guess."  
  
"Don't worry about it, OK?"  
  
"But – "  
  
"OK?" he repeats, more forcefully.  
  
"OK", I say back because even if I had the energy there's no arguing with him. "You call everyone?"  
  
"I called everyone. Maggie cried, Tatijana cried and my father pretended he wasn't crying but he was. I think maybe Zagreb had better watch out tonight. I promised you'd call them yourself when you feel up to it."  
  
"Round about this little thing's fifth birthday I guess." Rosa starts to stir. "God, I have to feed her, don't I?"  
  
"If you want her to make her fifth birthday, yes." I feel a little cold right there because I'm thinking of Marko who never made his fifth birthday but he's smiling.  
  
"I could use some help."  
  
"I'll get Veronica." But as he makes to stand up I hold onto him. There's something I want to say but I don't even know what it is.  
  
"Luka – "  
  
And then he kisses me, not the chaste, tender kiss of childbed mythology but a fierce, bruising thing between a man and a woman over our baby, right over her, and I guess he gets what it is I want to say. "I know," he says against my mouth, "I know."  
  
You ever do that, look back and you can see those moments when things change, or when they don't, or when you can think "Yeah, that was good"? I never used to, never had the knack of letting myself just sink into the moment, not worrying about where it came from or what came next. I can look back and see where stuff changed, where things changed shape or direction. But the good stuff I kind of missed, waiting for the next thing to jump out at me.  
  
Now? Now I can sink into this moment and that long list of things I knew were never going to lead anywhere good is filed away for reference only. Because things have changed for ever. I can sink into this moment and yes, I know all about the shit that's waiting for me, for us, and I can say "Bring it on" because things have changed for ever and I've changed them, me, and whether stuff is good or bad it's mine, mine and his and hers, this stuff that's changed for ever.  
  
This is living, see? 


	25. Epilogue

Well Californiagirl did it so I have to because I have to have the last word. I'm petty like that. ;) There are bits in this which will make more sense if you read her epilogue (in "Once More With Feeling") first. And leave her a review!

Rated for a tiny bit of rather vulgar language. Ahem.

Critical Path - Epilogue

It's bad timing really, a January baby. Living in Chicago I mean. There's snow on the ground, it's freezing and the sky is the colour of lead. No parties in the garden for us.

365 days. Doesn't sound like much does it, but if you measure time by what's happened rather than by hours and days it's a very long time indeed – it's a lifetime – her lifetime. And after only 365 days since I first met her I sometimes have trouble seeing that baby in her, that baby whose unfocused eyes slid around in her head alarmingly and who needed me even if she didn't know me and who I didn't know but needed all the same.

She knows me now, she smiles when she sees me, reaches for me, cries sometimes when I have to leave her. And yeah, her first word was "Mama". Well, munamum if we're being totally accurate and OK it's what she calls her toes now, but we both knew what she meant. Luka though, he's Tata … after he stopped being munamum. What?

The tree he planted for her next to Jasna's and Marko's is looking a little sorry for itself right now. I was a little sorry for myself too for a while. It's surprising how soon you get used to wearing pyjamas all day, running out of tea cups because you never have the chance to load the dishwasher and learning not to care too much what your hair looks like after it's not been washed for 6 days.I felt like a cow, this little parasite literally sucking the life out of me, and at four months I put her in the car and went to the store for formula. I know, I know, but jeez, a happy mom makes for a happy baby, right?

Up to then I really only lived when Luka was home. He'd run me a bath or tell me to take a shower while he took care of Rosa, and the housework and the cooking. How do women on their own do this stuff? Do they just strap the kid to their backs or something? I'd have died without Luka, I swear I would.

But then he'd seen it all before, and in a tiny apartment with not much money. And isn't it funny how knowing that there are lots of people worse off than you doesn't help one little bit.

Middle of March and it was still cold but Luka had lit a fire and I listened on the monitor to the sounds of him settling her. She was sleeping better but it was still a lottery. When he eventually came downstairs he dropped onto the sofa beside me like he was dead, eyes closed, needing a shave, the weight he'd lost more evident. For two minutes we sat and listened to the fire crackle and then the monitor crackled too and emitted a long, high pitched wail.

"Fuck it!" I grabbed the goddamned thing and hurled it as hard as I could against the wall and there was silence with only the half heard ghost wail that came from upstairs. He looked at me then, eyebrows raised, his expression mild.

"Better?"

"Much".

"She's still crying."

"I'll go".

"Be my guest."

When I finally got back downstairs he was stretched full length on the sofa and I just let myself topple onto him, and he laughed a little and held me.

You know," he said, "This too will pass".

And it did.

oOo

So, 365 days. She'll be one tomorrow and we're having a party and if the food's terrible it won't be my fault because the guests are all bringing it. I don't do catering. And the guests – work people, Kerry even, Professors Mr and Mrs Backhaus and their cat hair, Robin the lawyer, who will try to shake hands with Rosa and smile bravely if she gets food on his perfect cashmere sweater that I covet. They'll all be there to congratulate us on still being alive, still being together, still being sane. Well, no, maybe not that. And it's a party for me too as I very conveniently arranged to give birth within a week of my own birthday.

But there's more.

Maggie arrived yesterday, loaded with presents for Rosa who had lost interest in ripping paper off Christmas gifts after about the 300th package.

"It's no fun having a birthday so close to Christmas is it sweetie?" she cooed over Rosa who took the line of least resistance and smiled and pointed at her nose and said "Nah".

So now I'm thinking, what am I, chopped liver? I don't remember her having quite this approach to my birthday. My 7th for example was particularly memorable. We spent it in a motel in Minnetonka after Maggie decided she hated our house and dragged me and Eric away in the middle of the night with not enough clothes and no real plan. We went home after a week. A few months later dad left. That was a busy year.

New starts though, we've all made new starts since then so I smile and make tea and chat about Eric who spent Christmas with us.

And there is yet more.

Ivica.

Luka is collecting him from the airport today and she's nervous.

"Will I like him?"

"That's kind of … redundant."

"What?"

"He's – a force of nature. You might as well worry about liking the sky – "

"Will he like me?"

" – or the sky liking you."

"What's he like?"

"Tall like Luka, same eyes, grey hair, stained fingers, dirty laugh." I stop there thinking the picture I'm painting is maybe not selling the old guy real well.

"No, I mean – what is he like?"

"You know what, he is what he is. He'll charm the pants off of you or you'll hate him. Que sera. But whatever happens don't take any bullshit from him, and I'm telling you now he'll probably dish it, and on no account feed him any because he'll eat it up with a spoon and a shit eating grin and hand it right back to you. Stand up to him and he might not like you but he'll respect you and for him that's more important. "

"Are you trying to scare me? It's working."

"Be yourself."

Oh God. She looks at me levelly for a moment and I look right back and then she nods slowly and says deadpan "Well, that's always served me really well in the past." It's a second before we both snort with laughter and then she shrugs "I'll just have to hope he's so besotted with Rosa that he doesn't notice me."

"Not a hope in hell."

oOo

"Hey, we're home!"

Maggie nearly drops her tea cup and she glances round the kitchen like she might be able to make a run for it.

"OK, shoulders back, head up – we're on Mom."

Ivica grins and there's that avalanche of a hug. He's all gallantry and telling me how motherhood suits me and I'm more beautiful than ever. "And you are still full of shit" I whisper in his ear.

"Where is my granddaughter?"

"Sleeping." I prise myself loose and I can her that my voice is tight as I introduce Maggie. Oh please, Oh please.

"It is lovely to meet you Maggie. Now I know where Abby gets her looks". She's totally blushing and I catch Luka's eye. He grimaces and rolls his eyes at his father's blatant flattery. Maggie's telling Ivica how much she loves his paintings and that she's a bit of an artist herself. Those eyebrows go up. "Tell me." He reaches for her arm and steers her into the living room.

There's a moment's silence. "Is it just me or are they being a bit too chummy?"

He lets out a breath he probably didn't know he was holding. "Throwing themselves into the part anyhow".

"She – " I don't get to finish because the 365 day old upstairs is calling for us. He tells me he'll go and while he's dealing with her I look past my own reflection into the darkening garden and then make my way to the living room to await the arrival of the star attraction. Luka and Rosa make their entrance, Luka speaking softly to her in Croatian. I hope he's telling her that her grandfather is a pushover for a pretty female so she should flash those pearly whites and flutter those eyelashes, oh, but don't ignore Maggie. This kid has responsibilities.

Ivica's in love from the get go. I don't think I've ever seen his eyes so soft. Rosa is as entranced by his pocket watch as he is by her and he tells Luka that she's beautiful. Of course she is. Maggie bolts for the kitchen, flapping her hands and telling no-one in particular that she's cooking dinner tonight and she hopes we all like Italian which I think is a rhetorical question. When I make to follow her she turns me out of my own kitchen. She's hiding. Great.

Well, dinner is OK although I'm too tense to taste it let alone enjoy it. Ivica continues to behave impeccably. He picks his way through the chit chat about his flight (crowded and uncomfortable) and the weather (cold in January – hold the front page) but thank God we have Rosa as a conversation piece. She obliges her artistic grandparents by producing her own Jackson Pollock on the table and her clothes and Maggie laughs when I say I'm sure she derives most of her nutrition by absorption but Ivica doesn't get it and Luka has to translate. He still only smiles politely which is freaking me right out. Where are the lewd cackles, the sly looks, the completely inappropriate flirting with me? My mom doesn't notice because she doesn't know that stuff but I catch her looking at me like she doesn't understand what all the fuss was about.

They continue with the Polite Game while Luka puts Rosa to bed. He takes his time, always sits watching her. On the nights I put her to bed he waits until we're sure she's staying down and then he goes in to her, sits down by the crib, watches; just watches. And sometimes I watch him watching her.

When I can't stand it any more I tell Ivica to get his coat and go outside for a smoke. He looks as though he might weep with gratitude and Maggie chirps that she'll go with him. When Luka gets downstairs he's puzzled, and assumes they were too much for me when I tell him I sent his dad outside.

"Not exactly. He's just acting so . . . weird".

"Well, you know my father".

" I do, that's what I mean. He's being so nice. He must hate her."

"Nah, it's because he loves you." I raise my eyebrows. "And, ah, I told him to . . be nice."

"Well tell him to stop it, it's driving me nuts".

"Only trying to help."

"I know. Me too."

"What?"

"I told her to behave."

We consider our ill judged attempts to control our unruly parents for a moment or two before deciding that maybe we should just roll with the punches, relax a little.

"Think we should go and talk to them?"

"Let them off the hook you mean?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know. Maybe we should make them work just a little longer."

"Abby."

"OK, OK, get my coat and we'll go set the poor guy free."

They're cosied up on the garden seat, smoking, and the Polite Game seems to have been abandoned because they're laughing, Ivica's cackle drowning out Maggie's giggle. It seems we've been played and Ivica reminds us that they're grandparents, not idiots. No shit.

oOo

Ivica, having travelled some several thousands of cigarettless miles to get here, is bushed, although he isn't quite so nice with his adjectives. They try and argue about who sleeps where and Maggie says she'll go to an hotel so we can have a bed rather than the pullout downstairs and she even means it. Persuading them to go to their allotted rooms is harder than getting Rosa to bed but they give in eventually. Parents. And once they're gone Luka confides that for what he has in mind it would be better if we were downstairs rather than next door to either one of them. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that he is his father's son and that I am very glad of it.

oOo

Rosa looks like an Inuit. All that quilting isn't helping with the walking project she has in hand. Still, she has Maggie eating out of her hand and seems happy playing in what's left of the snow in the garden while I sit inside and drink thick coffee with Ivica.

"Good legs."

"What?"

"Your mother. She is very pretty and she has good legs." Oh yeah, Ivica is back. "She's well these days?"

"She's always well until she . . . isn't."

"Cynical Abby?"

"Realistic."

He makes a little sound of disgust. "Cynics always say this."

"What can I tell you, too many years of expecting the worst."

"You were going to stop doing that."

"Can't do it all overnight. I didn't get a personality transplant."

"Good. She's happy for you. She loves you."

"I know. She always did."

"But . . . "

"Love isn't always enough is it?"

"No. I think never." His face brightens suddenly. "She told me last night something about you." Oh God, what now. "She tells me you could have married millionaire."

"Not really."

"No?"

"He never asked."

"You would say yes though?"

"Maybe. I don't know. It didn't happen, it doesn't matter."

"All that money," he sighs, "could keep horrible old foreign guy in paints and cigarettes in his old age."

"If I'd married him I would never have met you so that point is moot."

"Moot?"

"Not relevant."

"Oh. Still, he's coming here today, yes?"

"Ivica . . . "

"Maybe he adopt me?" We don't get any further with this surreal line of conversation because Luka joins us, showered and shaved.

"At last," says his father, "what time of day is this to be getting up?"

"It's 9.30, Tata, you have a watch", but Ivica is standing by the piano, running a hand over it. A sudden, vivid memory shoots fierce heat through my face and when I look at Luka he's studying me, the barest ghost of a smile in his eyes. Oh no, don't you dare.

"You play?"

"I – tinker on it." He's answering his father but he's looking at me. The heat in my face intensifies.

"Tinker for me now." Oh dear God.

"I don't think I'm ready for a public . . . performance." I can feel myself smiling now and I shake my head at him.

"What's public? I'm your father!" He looks between us, confused.

"How about some more coffee?" I ask too brightly and as I bolt for the kitchen I think I see an inkling of understanding in Ivica's expression. No-one could look at the grin on Luka's face and not get exactly what kind of five-finger exercises he was thinking about.

oOo

See I expect in about 16 years to be checking up on what's going on on the back yard bench when I hear giggling and simpering. I didn't expect to have to do it today.

"Mom, can you help me with the lunch things . . . now". She's flushed, excited . . . girlish. "Things not going so bad with Ivica then."

"He's charming! He's a gentleman, I don't meet many of those." I don't think my laugh is very pleasant. "What?"

"Oh, Mom, just … just …" _listen to yourself_ I want to say, but I don't.

"No, come on, let's have it. You're going to tell me to dial it down, behave myself, don't make a fool of myself and embarrass you in front of your friends."

"No, I'm not." Boy, do I want to. Oh great and now she looks hurt.

"I was having fun Abby – is that a crime?" My blood drops a couple degrees at that, like she's looked into my memories and found just the right one. I feel a little ashamed. "I'm a grown woman Abby having a little fun with a charming, attentive man. Sound familiar? "

"I – "

"What did you think, that we'd start making out while you all sing Happy Birthday?"

"I – "

"Well you know what, if we make out that's my business and his but if it makes you feel better I promise we'll wait until your guests have gone". She's smiling but there are tears in her eyes. She hands me the jug of water for the table and makes to walk past me, but I catch her hand and she stops, not looking at me.

"I worry, Mom. I look for signs and sometimes I . . . "

"Overreact."

"I guess."

She frees her hand from mine and leaves the kitchen, but she's back a moment later with her purse. She takes out a pill bottle and hold it up, tells me the date, tells me the dosage and rattles it so that I can see that the pills are gone. I nod.

"Are we good then? Am I free to smile at him again?"

Another nod. "Sorry." I really am.

"Come here." She hugs me and then pulls back and looks into my face, brushes my hair from my eyes. "You have to trust me. I won't do anything stupid." I nod again. "Unless he asks".

oOo

OK, so I have Ella and Rosa in the family room hurling gifts around while Elizabeth more or less joins in, The Professors Backhaus are just pixilated by the whole event and Robin from next door is talking to Frank and giving every appearance of enjoying it. I love Robin. He's the best baby sitter we have as he talks very seriously to Rosa about the law and 18th century porcelain in a sing-song voice that has her captivated. And he makes the best salad dressing I've ever tasted.

I see Carter catch my eye over Frank's head and then he heads back outside with Luka. I prefer not to think about that but a few minutes later he's back and heading for me and Maggie and Jing-Mei stands next to Luka looking tiny and ridiculously beautiful.

Carter is all smiles, sort of proud of himself. "Wait 'til you see what I got Rosa!"

"Where?"

"Outside."

"You did not buy her a pony."

"I did not buy her a pony. Hey Maggie," and he turns and hugs her, she congratulates him because I've told her that he and Jing-Mei are to be married and he's all smiles again as he turns to me. "So have you thought – "

"No, Carter.

"But – "

"She can barely walk. Have you given even a moment's thought to what she'd do with a basket of flower petals?"

"Eat them?"

"Frankly that's the best you could hope for."

"But you haven't changed your mind about the other thing?"

"No."

"Other thing?" Maggie asks.

"Your daughter" – and here he slips his arm through mine – "has consented to be my best man."

"She has?"

"She most certainly has. My parents will fall in a dead faint, there will be a horrified gasp through the cathedral and I shall enjoy every minute of it."

"Wouldn't you rather be enjoying marrying your fiancée?" Maggie isn't smiling.

Carter's smile slips a fraction. "Of course … " He's floundering.

"I'm just teasing, silly. Is she here? I'd love to meet her."

Carter glances over at Luka just in time to see Jing-Mei lay a hand on his arm, her head thrown back as she looks up at him. He's moving toward them fast now and takes Jing-Mei's hand, steering her back to us. But as he does I catch the wink Jing-Mei sends Luka. I leave Maggie to talk to them and slide up close beside him.

"What was that about?"

"Collusion."

I want him to tell me but he won't but he asks if I'm jealous, and because he wants me to be I am. Just a touch.

"Where is your dad?"

It seems that Ivica holds to some rather particular notion of good form that has arriving at parties – even his own – anything less than an hour after everyone else as unforgivably gauche. Within a half hour of him putting in an appearance I think he knows the age, political affiliation, marital status and probably shoe size of everyone there. He seems to spend a long time talking to Carter and then suddenly seems to be done with him, walking off toward Luka. Carter looks a little stunned and I take pity on him. The nursery is the only quiet room in the place so we go up there and sit on the floor and talk, Carter diligently arranging building blocks by colour before piling them carefully into a tower. He sits back proudly. "I was always good at this."

I extend a foot and topple the whole thing with a clatter.

"Hey, no fair!"

"I was always good at knocking down the efforts of the kids who were better at building than I was. It's mean and I'm not proud of it. Well maybe a little. Guess your skill and my skill are mutually incompatible."

"I'm starting again and you just keep your feet to yourself or I'll tell your Mom."

"So … Ivica seemed mighty interested in you."

"Is he on something? He scared the shit out of me."

"What did he say?"

"It's not what he said, it's how he said it. I could feel him creeping down my neural pathways."

"He's Croatian, not Vulcan."

"You never felt that?"

"Me? Nah. Well, maybe. Yeah. I guess I should have prepared you. He's a sweet guy."

"Sweet . . . sweet," he intones as though trying out the word against his image of Ivica and finding them a pretty poor match. "No, not sweet". He sets the last brick on his tower and looks up at me, beaming. "Hey, you never saw what I got Rosa! Come on before it gets too dark!" He stands up and holds out a hand to pull me to my feet.

"If it's a pony …"

"Wait and see!"

I knock down his tower as I pass. "Oops!"

oOo

"It's a Hummer!"

"I can see that."

"Isn't it the greatest thing you ever saw?"

"No. It's horrible. What does a 1 year old want with a Hummer?"

"She'll grow into it. Come on, it's great!"

"Yeah, if you want your kid to grow up a total asshole."

"You don't like it?"

"You don't really need me to answer that, do you?"

"Aw, come on, work with me. Luka hated it."

"Well, you know, when he's right he's right."

"I can't believe you two! I would have completely loved this when I was a kid."

"You probably had a Baby BMW from Bratz R Us".

"Funny. I don't know why you don't like it."

"She's one year old, Carter. Just take it back and buy her some finger paints or something."

"You're really no fun. First you knock my tower down and now this."

"And now you're sulking. Do I have to get Ivica on this?"

"I'll take it back tomorrow."

oOo

My daughter doesn't seem to appreciate the choral efforts of my guests as they serenade the birthday girl and she hides her face against me. I get her to look toward Luka and the camera but she doesn't quite manage a smile for him. But she smiles at her piece of cake and before I can stop her she's up to her knuckles in sponge cake and frosting. She examines her cake covered fingers and then does what she does best, shoves them in her mouth. And then into mine which makes her giggle. I'm pretty sure I have frosting in my hair by now.

"Smile".

See that's not fair and OK I'm not proud of using my kid to get back at my husband but if I have to have cake all over my face so does he. He leans in close and invites me to lick it off, and I'm tempted but instead I just smile and hand him a napkin.

By the time the last of the guests leave Rosa is asleep in my lap, cake and frosting still all over her and smeared on my sweater. Maggie has already gone to bed but Ivica shows no signs of slowing down. He takes my hand and kisses it, and smiles, hugely satisfied with himself and the world in general. Luka disentangles Rosa and says he'll leave the two of us to our evil plans. Ivica feigns innocence and fools neither one of us. I decide that attack is the best form of defence.

"You scared Carter."

"Carter?" he frowns.

"You don't fool me old man."

"He's rich man, huh? So that stick he has up his ass is made of gold."

"Hey, I don't insult your friends."

"You don't know my friends."

"He's a good guy."

"That's what Luka said."

"And if he can say it . . . "

"Eh, he wouldn't have been right for you."

"I think we both figured that one out."

"No regrets? You could be rich woman now."

"I am a rich woman now."

"Hah, yes, you have the truth there. I'm glad you didn't marry Mr Gold Stick, very glad."

"Stop with the stick thing, OK?"

"OK, I stop. Funny though, eh? Shame your mother had to go to bed so early."

"She has a very long bus ride ahead of her tomorrow."

"I like her."

"I noticed. I think it's mutual." He looks puzzled. "She likes you too."

And here he becomes animated, indignant, "Luka warned me to behave myself, like I'm 17 and she's a little virgin."

"I was worried, he saw that."

"Why worried?"

How to explain this. "Sometimes what would be OK with most people looks like the start of something else with her. It wouldn't be the first time she'd made a fool of herself with a man."

"And now you too! You think I would let her do that? You think I would take . . . " he says something in Croatian, casts about for the word.

"Advantage?"

"Yes, you think that? I don't do that, I never have. Well, maybe once. Twice. But with your mother? I'm old but I'm not crazy, I don't shit on my own doorstep."

"Hey, take it easy, it's not – "

"And her, what is she to do for rest of her life, stay home and watch TV, bake cakes? She has right to her life, to a man in her bed if she needs one."

I'm talking to my father in law about my mother's sex life. You couldn't make this stuff up. "I overreacted, OK? I told her I'm sorry, she's OK with it. You know I think you're just pissed because you didn't get anywhere with her."

"How do you know?"

"What?"

"How far I got?"

"Stop right there old man."

"You know this is terrible party, we have no dancing."

"We have no guests."

"So?" He's up and rifling through the CDs and as Natalie Cole strikes up he sashays over to me and whisks me into a pretty good hold, nudges me around the floor.

"Hey, you're good at this!"

"You're surprised. Thankyou so much."

"I just never thought – "

"Elena and I used to dance. Two babies in the house, no money but we had her father's old records and so we danced. She was better than me, of course she was, she had music in her feet as well as her hands". He's quiet for a moment, remembering.

"I wish I could have met her."

He just nods and we dance in silence for a moment. As the song ends he takes my face between his hands and kisses me.

"May I cut in?"

Neither of us had seen Luka watching us. Ivica hands me over, implying that Luka wouldn't have had such an easy time of it if he hadn't been ready for his bed. He doesn't leave straight away but watches us from the doorway; I don't hear him leave and it's only when the sound of his footsteps on the stairs reaches me that I look and see the doorway empty.

My mother, his father, light blue touch paper and – enjoy. No fireworks, no disasters, we came through, all of us. I don't think there's anything we can't do now and tell him so. I'm thinking maybe we could shift this to the horizontal and carry on dancing but then I have to smile and I explain that making out downstairs on the sofa bed while my mom is upstairs reminds me of being a teenager and smuggling a boy in at home and then I remember our conversation in Ivica's apartment about being cramped and anxious. This is neither but the need for stealth and quiet adds a certain _frisson_ to the proceedings and I'm feeling warm and kind of charged all through as he holds me afterwards.

I'm not even sure where I found the bomb I dropped on him next.

"I've been thinking …" He kisses my neck; yeah I can tell what he's thinking.

"I'm serious." He lies on his back and stares at the ceiling, bracing himself.

And here I go. Med school in the fall, what does he think?

He'll think I'm crazy, of course he will and he'll be right, I don't really know why I started thinking about it again.

"You should."

"Are you kidding?"

"No".

"We could make it work?"

"Have to if it's what you want." He looks at me then. "Part of who you are, isn't it? Children grow up, marriages cool down and in the end the one you have to answer to is yourself. That's my job – to help you to be everything you can be."

Sometimes he sees who I am before I do and sometimes I remind him of who he is when he forgets. It's not a bad combination. At least he's honest enough not to try and tell me it will all be OK, not to worry about it. Instead he tells me that it will be hard but that's a lot easier than pretending.

"Why do we never do things the easy way?"

He shrugs. "Insanity. Runs in the family."

"You don't think . . . "

"What?"

"That they're the sane ones and we're nuts?"

He concedes the possibility and asks me for my plan in the light of this diagnosis; my suggestions meet with his approval, including as they do a full physical exam with the possibility of the use of soft restraints, and he very generously consents to be a teaching case.

oOo

Carter and Jing-Mei were married that spring and in the fall Maggie got engaged to a guy who worked in the Fire Department in St Paul; they aren't married yet but she's on her meds, doing fine. Our summers have been punctuated by Ivica's visits and Damir and Tatijana came over with the kids at Thanksgiving the year Rosa was two.

We're settled now, I'm an R2, Luka made ER Chief, we have more money, things are calmer; we even have time to make love at leisure now and I'm lying here thinking about it all.

God, it seems like such a long time ago. I still don't like to think of the crazy hours, day care, snatched lunches with Luka and Rosa, studying with one eye on my books and the other on my little girl. There were whole days I went to bed and couldn't remember a thing I'd done since getting up.

I don't know how we got through it all.

And I can't believe that I'm about to tell my post coitally sleepy husband that we're about to go through it all again.

END


	26. Epilogue II Ivica

Ivica Kovac's friend Drazan had once, very pleased with himself, told his companions that life was like a shit sandwich; the more bread you have the less shit you have to eat. Whilst Srjdan and Rade had rolled their eyes and told him that that one was so old it had whiskers, Ivica had given in to the very unappealing impulse to rebut the accuracy of the assertion.

"That's not true."

"Of course it is, if you have money – "

"I know what it means, but it's just not true. You eat the same amount of shit, you just don't taste it as much." They'd stared at him for a couple of moments and then Srjdan sniffed and ordered more drinks.

Now, as he lay in bed considering his surroundings, his granddaughter asleep in the room next to his, Maggie asleep in the one across the hall, and the voices of his son and daughter in law a barely audible murmur below him, he basked in the warmth of his absolute rightness. The room, the whole house, was quietly affluent, unostentatious but comfortable in every small regard. Its regular occupants he knew to have been served their share of shit – more than their fair share – but he couldn't help but think that coming home to comforts like these every night would make such shit as they might be dished these days a deal more palatable.

The house in which he'd grown up was, he calculated, bigger than this one, yet he had no abiding memory of spaciousness, housing as it did not only his parents and himself with his five siblings but also two grandparents, the man who helped on the farm and a succession of large and inconvenient dogs. The very notion that Rosa should have her own room seemed to him absurd. His own mother had used the bottom drawer of an old chest for her youngest child as the next youngest still occupied the crib. Ivica had not had a bed to himself until he was 16 when his oldest brother had left for the army and even then he'd had to share again when he came home with a wife.

Now look at this. He had his own bathroom; Maggie was asleep in a double bed which stood empty for most of the time, and he knew that there was yet another bedroom which remained for the time being unfurnished. He was warm in the middle of January and he knew that tomorrow there would be an ocean of hot water for them all to take unnecessarily long showers.

It had been a busy few days and although Ivica was exhausted he knew that sleep was an impossibility. His journey here had been little short of torture. He didn't much like leaving Europe anyway, and the journey hadn't improved since the last time he'd visited when at least he'd had Damir and Tatijana to talk to.

He hated the press of people, hated the regimentation. Go here, do that, queue here, wait, move. He loathed with a passion the plastic furnishings, the synthetic carpets of the airports, the overpriced, barely edible stuff that passed for food. He hated the appraising gaze of the little man in the ill fitting uniform as he checked him over, as he glanced from his face to his passport and back again even as he fought to stop himself sticking out his tongue at him; disliked the feigned pleasantries and over made up faces of the cabin crew, hated the meal they served him, hated the movies, hated his own long legs, hated that he couldn't smoke, even when he got off the plane, hated collecting his disgraceful old suitcase, hated that he needed a shave, hated that the area around airports is always so bloody miserable.

And for just a brief, nicotine deprived instant, he'd hated Luka for neither allowing him to smoke in the car nor pulling over for him to light up in the unbelievably fucking cold outdoors of Chicago which seemed colder and greyer than Dubrovnik even though he knew it probably wasn't.

Impossibly, his irritation increased as his son gave him his instructions, told him to behave himself when he finally met the crazy woman that was Abby's mother. He wasn't sure how he felt about her. He remembered Dusan when Emilia had gone off the rails, had sat and drunk with him, listened to him and recognised his laughter as the grief it really was, and he'd felt an awful resentment toward the woman for what it all did to his friend. It had been easy for him to take the moral high ground with Abby about it when he didn't have to deal with the object of her anguish face to face but now he was worried. He wanted a cigarette and badly, and wondered how Luka could be so cruel as to deprive him like this.

Ivica didn't argue but stared gloomily out of the window, watching the scenery slither past, not really taking it in. The boy was getting too big for his boots. He turned his head, studied his son; he looked well, he looked at ease, he looked himself. And God, that was good to see, and he should say so.

"You're looking pale".

"It's winter in Chicago, I should have a tan?"

"You should get out in the fresh air more."

"I have a one year old daughter, a busy job and a wife who is as exhausted as I am. Bracing walks by the lake lose their appeal when it's this cold and there's a good fire burning at home."

"Fire's still burning, huh?" That got a laugh at least. "First lesson of a happy marriage – don't let it go out, you'll never light it again."

"You're speaking from experience of course."

"Observation."

"Uh-huh."

"Look, can we pull over? I really need a cigarette."

"I shouldn't."

"Yes you should, I'm your father, you should do as I say."

"But not as you do."

"Ah, naturally not that. But come on, boy, stop the car."

"When we're off the freeway."

"How long is that?"

"Not long."

Ten minutes later and Ivica was standing, collar pulled up under his ears, bouncing a little on his toes, blowing smoke rings. Luka refused to get out of the car and glanced at his watch pointedly a couple of times whilst Ivica just as pointedly ignored him. Eventually Luka leaned over and opened the door.

"Get in, Abby will be wondering where we are." Ivica raised his eyebrows. "And if your next sentence includes the words henpecked or pussy whipped or any other disgusting variation on the theme I will leave you here to freeze."

Much restored, Ivica settled himself into his seat before suddenly pressing icy hands to either side of Luka's neck , raising a yelp of protest. "Shut up and drive, I want to see my granddaughter."

Ivica's ebullience held up the rest of the way home. He amused himself by playing with the SUV's stereo system and the iPod, whistling softly through his teeth at its slender elegance. "Anna has one of these. She wears it like jewellery, never parted from it."

"Probably afraid that Josip will put it in the toaster."

When, tired of gadgetry, Ivica started to rifle through the glove compartment Luka couldn't stand it any more and leaned over, snapping it shut.

"What, you don't want me to see what you have in there?"

"I don't have anything in there."

"No incriminating silk underwear?"

"Well apart from that, obviously."

"You been wearing it or collecting souvenirs?"

"Yes, of course, I spend all the spare time I don't have seducing women I don't meet in here and then I keep their panties as trophies."

"Difficult times after a baby comes, I understand. Women, well, they have other things on their minds. Don't worry, I won't tell your wife."

Luka shook his head and smiled. "Did you … ?"

"What? Good God, man, no, what kind of a shit do you take your father for? Anyway if your grandmother had found out she'd have had my balls on a plate. I was horny not stupid."

"There's a difference?"

Ivica grinned. "It's a nice car. Can I drive?"

"No."

"Just for – "

"No."

oOo

The baby stroller and coats littering the hallway notwithstanding, the house had the well scrubbed and slightly smug air which Ivica associated with a particular brand of American affluence, an impression formed by long acquaintance with movies and TV shows. Even the things which were out of place seemed to be in their place. Really, it was so disappointing; he didn't know where Luka got his tidy streak.

Abby looked well, softer somehow and he told her so as he hugged her, told her she was as beautiful as ever.

"And you are still full of shit" she whispered in his ear. Coming from her it was, in its easy familiarity and trust, as good as a declaration of devotion. She may have looked well but she was clearly not at ease and, steeling himself, Ivica turned to greet the source of that unease. Petite, trim, pretty, dark hair, big eyes; he took Maggie in with an artist's keen eye for detail, noted the tension in her frame, the anxiety in her eyes, thought she looked just about ready to make a run for it.

On with the show. The little gallantries came easily to him and she seemed to lap it up. She talked fast so that he caught only a fraction of what she was saying but out of the jumble of words he latched onto her assertion that she was an artist too. Well, here was something. He took her arm and steered her away from their offspring into the lounge. He listened patiently to her gushing praise of his work. She still spoke too fast but he realised that she did in fact know something about the subject. He observed quietly and eventually she faltered and then stopped.

"I'm sorry, I talk too much, I know I do, I always have."

"What is too much?"

"I mean I just keep right on going, I never know when to stop."

"But you have stopped."

"I know, I know, but . . . and really I'm not usually this bad, but when I'm nervous . . " She ground to a halt again. Ivica didn't step in with the question about why she might be nervous. He knew damned well why she was nervous and wondered what the hell Luka and Abby had told her about him. Abruptly she looked up at him, looked him straight in the eye. "Would you say she looks happy?"

"She … "

"Abby. Would you say she's happy?"

What the fuck? "You would know better than me."

"You'd think so."

"But?"

"I don't know, she's good at hiding things, you haven't seen her for more than a year, you'd see the changes, you know, things I wouldn't pick up on, little things, things that – " _oh for Christ's sake, shut up._

"I think she's happy, yes. "

"Oh, you really do? Really?"

"Really I do. Luka too."

"They're good for one another, I honestly think that, so good for one another." Ivica watched this exchange as though from a distance, wanting so badly to cut the crap. He wondered what Abby's father had been like and he wondered too what the hell this woman was like off her meds. He became aware that she'd stopped talking and was looking closely at him. Had she asked him something?

"I'm sorry, what . . . "

"Abby's afraid."

"Afraid?"

"That I'll embarrass her, that I'll do something stupid. Or maybe she's just afraid for me."

Ivica examined his shoes, which were almost as disgraceful as his suitcase. He noted in a detached sort of way that one of his laces was frayed almost right through. "I have been told to behave myself."

"I see. I have my instructions too. I'm to be myself."

"And I am to be not myself. Too frightening, too rude, too . . . " He sighed impatiently and closed his eyes for a moment. He wanted to ask her what their lives had been like, what she felt as the mother she had been seeing the mother Abby now was; he wanted to tell her that the idea of seeing Rosa in the flesh was the most wonderful and most terrible thing imaginable for him , that he dreaded looking at the child he'd only seen in photographs and feeling something inside him break, of seeing Jasna or Danijela or Marko looking back at him; he wanted to say that they should drop this bullshit. He got as far as opening his mouth but at that moment the object of his fears arrived, carried in her father's arms and the moment was upon him.

Dark hair, eyes like Luka's but set in an infant version of Abby's face, sturdy, strong. Rosa didn't protest when she was handed over to Ivica, bore his scrutiny uncomplainingly, watched his face as he spoke to her in a language she would probably never speak herself, grabbed at the pocket watch which had been his grandfather's. Ivica saw her smile and in and instant his heart broke and was as instantly mended.

"She's beautiful". Strange how one was allowed to state the obvious at times like this and no-one said "Of course she is"; strange too how one was allowed to tell outright lies and still everyone would concur. Still, on this occasion he was telling the truth. He held the watch to Rosa's ear and her eyes widened and then became dreamy and distant, mesmerised, and he felt the weight of her head as she leaned into the watch.

And then, damn it, Maggie was talking again, dinner, dinner, dinner, and did they all like Italian. As he watched her scurry into the kitchen Ivica wondered whether she had seen his heart break and re-form, whole. He thought perhaps she had.

oOo

He wanted a cigarette, was irked by how long it had been since he'd had one.

He'd barely tasted his food although he'd been careful to make all the right appreciative remarks and to eat everything on his plate. In truth he'd wanted just to watch Rosa and her fierce concentration as she spread pasta sauce and remnants of bread around her plate and on herself, remembering Luka and Damir, and then Jasna and Marko . . . Rosa had chosen that moment to become fractious and had been carried away to her bed by her father who Ivica noted with approval hadn't seemed to care if half his daughter's food was now smeared on his own clothes. Eh, a little mess for much beauty; all was as it should be.

He tapped his fingers on the table, fidgeted in his seat until eventually Abby told him to get his coat and go outside for a smoke. He didn't need telling twice and was half way out the back door before he realised that Maggie was following. They sat in silence whilst he smoked his cigarette down, immediately lighting another. It was damned cold but that felt good; the sky had cleared and he could see the stars which after all looked much the same whether they hung in the sky over Chicago or Vodice or Dubrovnik. He thought of Damir and Tatijana and the children and the Christmas he had spent with them and was suddenly homesick. He heard Maggie cough lightly and supposed he should at least try to make conversation.

"How am I doing?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Horrible old foreign guy who can't keep his mouth shut so his son tells him to be good – how am I doing?"

"You aren't quite what I was expecting. Abby said you were a force of nature."

"A what?"

"Like the sky she said."

"She's crazy." Damn.

"Runs in the family" He laughed at that. "You've . . . you've been very charming."

"I am not charming."

"Oh, but you are."

"Horrible, foreign, big mouth, bad habits, Luka knows me, this is why he tells me to be good. I say we stop. What is the point of talking to each other if I am to be not myself and you are to be not yourself. I prefer the truth." Maggie nodded. "Yes? Yes!" He took her hand and kissed it and settled back into silence as he looked at the stars. Maggie giggled softly.

"We let them tell us what to do."

"Big mistake. We don't do that any more."

"You know I really don't smoke but – "

"Oh, yes, of course, please." He lit the cigarette for her, admiring again her prettiness. Yes, if Abby aged as well as this Luka could have no cause for complaint.

"You know Abby could have married a very rich man."

"What?"

"A millionaire." Ivica's scepticism must have been evident because she continued, "Really, her boyfriend before Luka, he was worth an absolute mint."

"Mint?" What the hell was she talking about?

"You know, where they make the money." He shook his head. "Where they print the bank notes and stamp out the coins."

"That's a mint?"

"Yes. Anyway, he was worth a fortune."

"Why didn't she marry him?"

"I don't know, not really, not the details. I know he was going to ask her, he even showed me the ring." Her face became dreamy. "Such a beautiful ring."

Ivica snorted. "Luka didn't give her engagement ring", and Maggie came to her senses, embarrassed, alarmed.

"Oh, I didn't mean – "

Ivica shrugged; "Doesn't matter."

"I wasn't comparing them."

"So you tell me this why?"

"I don't know. It's just . . . it's funny the choices we make. He was the sort of guy you dream of when you're 16, you know, good looking, a doctor, rich, sweet natured."

"Maybe not all he's cracked up to be, huh?"

"Oh no, he's very sweet, very nice. But people either fit or they don't."

"They didn't."

"They could have maybe. Wrong time. And anyway look how much better things turned out."

"Abby better not hope my paintings make Luka millionaire when I die."

"I don't think she's banking on it, no."

"That is very good thing, because I plan to leave everything to my mistress."

"You have a mistress?"

"Not yet." He raised his eyebrows at her and she choked on her cigarette so that he had to slap her on the back and offer her his handkerchief to wipe her streaming eyes.

So it was, when Luka and Abby came outside, they found them huddled together against the cold, still laughing. The looks on their childrens faces spoke volumes, and Ivica fought to suppress a smirk before telling them that they were in fact grandparents, not morons. He was gratified to see that they had the grace to look a little shame faced.

oOo

Ivica watched over the rim of his coffee cup as Rosa, supervised by Maggie, tottered around in the garden, unrecognisable in her quilted suit which was soon soggy at the knees as she stumbled and fell into the snow. His movements swift, he reached into his pocket and splashed a measure of the contents of his hip flask into the cup. Better. He turned as he heard Abby return to the room with her own coffee.

"Good legs."

"What?"

"Your mother", he nodded in Maggie's direction, "she is very pretty and she has good legs. She's well these days?"

"She's always well until she . . . isn't."

"Cynical Abby?"

"Realistic."

"Cynics always say this."

"What can I tell you, too many years of expecting the worst."

"You were going to stop doing that."

"Can't do it all overnight. I didn't get a personality transplant."

"Good. She's happy for you. She loves you."

"I know. She always did."

"But . . . "

"Love isn't always enough is it?"

"No. I think never." Ivica was surprised to realise that this was something he'd always known. "She told me last night something about you. She tells me you could have married millionaire."

"Not really."

"No?"

"He never asked." He looked hard for signs of regret; found none, was satisfied.

"You would say yes though?"

"Maybe. I don't know. It didn't happen, it doesn't matter."

"All that money," he sighs, "could keep horrible old foreign guy in paints and cigarettes in his old age."

"If I'd married him I would never have met you so that point is moot."

"Moot?" Why did they all insist on using words he could have no chance of understanding? It irritated the shit out of him to have to ask, to make himself look ignorant.

"Not relevant."

"Oh. Still, he's coming here today, yes?"

"Ivica . . . "

"Maybe he adopt me?" Ivica was prevented by Luka's arrival from embarking on an extended fantasy about the spectacular largesse of a man he'd never met but had already decided he didn't like.

"At last, what time of day is this to be getting up?"

"It's 9.30, Tata, you have a watch."

Ivica stood by the piano, running a hand over it; it looked different here, smaller; not so dusty, he thought, a little ashamed. He had a sudden, intense yearning to hear it, to reassure himself that it sounded the same. Suddenly, vividly, he remembered Elena at the keyboard, laughing as he bent over her to nuzzle her neck, allowing his fingers to tease the buttons of her shirt open, allowing his exploring hands to pursue their downward path, protesting at the bum notes she played as a result, even as paint stained fingers moved over her breasts, even as she leaned back into his embrace, throat arched to receive his kiss; she never protested for long. He could almost hear the sound of the curtains shifting in the breeze, the sound of the traffic coming up from the Zagreb streets, of a baby in the downstairs apartment crying, and then the soft discord as his wife's hands fell helpless onto the keys before he turned her around and knelt between her knees, his face buried in her open shirt, her breath catching as his hands pushed her skirt higher and higher.

He shook himself a little, swallowed the tears that threatened and opened the lid of the piano, rested his fingers on the keys, did not depress them. What if they sounded different? He believed he might die if they sounded different. "You play?" He didn't take his eyes from the keys.

"I – tinker on it" Luka told him, a strange timbre to his voice which Ivica couldn't quite place.

"Tinker for me now."

"I don't think I'm ready for a public . . . performance."

He turned now to look at Luka. "What's public? I'm your father!" Ivica's look of confusion turned to one of speculation as he caught the blush on Abby's face and the grin on Luka's.

"How about some more coffee?" As she hurried out Ivica saw her catch Luka's eye, saw him wink; Luka looked at him, trying to keep his face in order and found his father regarding him levelly; the grey eyebrows rose.

"Mind your own business, old man, mind your own business."

oOo

Rosa's determined if inelegant efforts at getting around under her own steam were being applauded by Maggie when Ivica strolled into the garden. He took out his cigarettes but at the look on Maggies' face sighed gracelessly and returned them to his pocket. Jesus, the kid was a year old, he didn't think she'd be taking much notice of what he was doing.

"Have you seen the trees?"

"Just trees" he shrugged uncooperatively.

"No, the little ones right at the bottom of the garden. Luka planted them for … for his children. Go and take a look", and she mimed raising a cigarette to her lips.

"Oh, yes, I should see them, yes."

It had been one of the multitude of adjustments he'd had to make when they moved to the city. Not having open space to call his own had been hard. He'd grown up used to his family's fields, the little orchard, his mother's vegetable patch and flower garden. Zagreb had other charms but at first he'd felt hemmed in and claustrophobic. Over time he'd learned to make do with drinking in the landscape as the train had moved through it, but he'd still missed the growing things. Now, in Vodice he confined himself to a few pots of geraniums, but he had the sea in front of him and the hills and fields behind and it was enough for him; the little terrace and courtyard boasted by Damir's house in Dubrovnik was enough. He wondered when he'd changed.

The little trees were leafless and he couldn't tell what species they were. Some scraps of tinsel clung to the slender branches which made him smile. Two of them had the edge on the third and it was clear to him that here he was looking at Jasna, Marko and Rosa.

"Mind if I smoke?" he asked them. It was quiet here, although Rosa's occasional squeal and Maggie's cries of "Clever girl!" reached him. He was glad to see this, to see that Luka's children had more than the headstone in Vukovar as their memorial. He noticed too that there was no tree for Danijela, and for a moment he felt indignant for her, but he thought of the new wife who now filled the empty half of his son's bed and had to concede that that was an altogether more awkward proposition, one perhaps best left unaddressed, in this garden at any rate. He ground out his cigarette amongst the fallen leaves and made his way back to Maggie. Rosa was scraping melting grey snow together with a view to filling the little tin bucket decorated with improbably hued ducks and geese which Ivica had painted for her and sent over for Christmas. Her aim was as yet inexpert.

"Miss Rosa likes her bucket, huh? Yes?" Going down on one knee and biting back a curse as he felt the cold meltwater soak through his trouser leg, he took the bucket in his hands and tried to anticipate the trajectory of the snow as Rosa tipped it from her spade. "See! You're the best, a champion!" She mimicked his applause, raised her arms over her head, threw herself off balance and sat down in the slush. Maggie swooped down and set her back on her feet, and Rosa went back to her task. "Me too" Ivica said and Maggie helped him to his feet, his joints protesting, and they settled themselves onto the seat. "Nice trees."

"It's a beautiful idea, isn't it?"

"Luka has his moments, you know, when I can see he's mine."

"Praise indeed."

He shrugged. "I look at Damir – Luka's brother, you know? – and I don't see me in him. Good thing probably, one of me is enough."

"What about our wife?"

"Elena? No, none of her either. Except . . . "

"Except?"

"He doesn't take my bullshit. Maybe that's Elena."

"She died young."

"Too young." Another shrug and he nodded toward the little trees. "But down there, that's too young, you know? She had a life, she had her music, she had her boys."

"And she had you."

"She had me. Had to die to get away from me." He saw at once that Maggie was taken aback. "It's joke, Maggie, just a joke."

She nodded. "You miss her."

"Do I? I don't know. It's harder to remember her. I miss … just now, in the house, I was looking at piano, remembering … I miss the sweetness of her. I miss that she loved me. Selfish."

"Grief is selfish."

"Grief is greedy, it will eat you up if you let it. Life," and here he nodded toward Rosa, "goes on. And what about Maggie?"

"Me?"

"Who is sweet for you?"

"Oh, no-one at the moment, I'm good on my own."

"Don't wait too long. Keep your eyes open for … possibilities." Maggie wondered that the word could sound as lascivious as it did coming from him and she leaned against him and laughed at the precise moment that Luka and Abby came out to call them to lunch. That frown was back on Abby's face and stayed there as she followed her mother into the house. Jesus Christ, what now?

"You're a lucky man if Abby holds up that well . . . . .pretty woman."

"Don't even think about it."

"What?'

"I'll have your hide hanging on my wall if you even think of touching Maggie."

"Luka . . . what would give you that idea?"

"I don't know, the leer on your face maybe. Abby would freak. Don't do it. More trouble than any of us need . . . or want . . . or deserve. And I'll kill you."

"Calm down. Maggie and me . . . we understand each other . . . artists . . . she's nice woman when she's not crazy. But don't worry . . . "

"Sorry." He sounded as though he meant it.

"No, it's okay, you saw your wife worried . . .you were worried . . .it's okay. Maggie and I we're friends . . .we're grandparents . . . .no more . . .no less. Unless she takes her clothes off at the party than we're . . . .less."

"Tata"

"It's a joke son, just a joke." How often would he have to say that today? He didn't add that he was pretty sure that if he decided to ignore his son's threats and turn on the charm he could have Maggie eating out of his hand, but he took some satisfaction in thinking it. They went indoors, ate lunch and he remembered the photographs Tatijana had sent over along with Rosa's birthday presents. Maggie said he should sit next to her and look at the pictures.

"What for? I see those people all the time." He was tired, the women had the party to set up, he would take himself out of the way, take a nap like the old man he was.

He didn't sleep. Lying on his bed, hands folded at his chest, he studied the ceiling, heard the voices from downstairs, Maggie's prominent amongst them, heard someone, Luka he thought, bring Rosa upstairs for a nap; the very young, the old – napping in the middle of the day. He realized that he hadn't taken off his shoes and raised one leg as far into the air as his hip would allow. The shoes really were awful. Every part of them had been mended or replaced until none of the originals remained and still he knew them to be the most comfortable shoes in the world. Nonetheless he knew he would take them off and instead wear the pair he had in his case, the pair Damir had gone with him to buy. God. He let his leg drop and huffed out an exasperated sigh. He wasn't sure why he felt so out of sorts but he most assuredly did. He wondered about the man Carter who Maggie had talked about. Why had she brought that up? Was she telling him that the desire of a wealthy man was a testament to Abby's worth? That Abby's decision to marry Luka was a testament to _his_ worth? He was at once curious and anxious to meet the man, unaccountably resentful of him, and it was with this thought in his mind that he shook himself and fished out his new shoes.

Ivica had read somewhere that wealthy people didn't look at your clothes but at your shoes and he wondered what Carter would make of his plain tan lace ups. They were probably the most expensive shoes he'd ever owned and he'd objected to spending nearly 500 kuna but Damir had said he'd pay for one shoe if Ivica paid for the other and he was glad now that he'd agreed. This Carter fellow probably had his shoes hand made in England, modeled on his own last and shipped over by the dozen pairs. He rubbed at the toes with his sleeve and then sniffed and dropped the shoes on the floor, before settling himself back down and closing his eyes.

Two hours later and Ivica stared into the mirror, his shock of grey hair combed, his face washed and his feet smartly shod. He brushed imaginary specks of fluff from his shoulders and nodded, satisfied. Guests had started to arrive, he'd heard the front door opening and closing, cries of greeting, laughter, the sound of a child, a girl he thought, in a state of high excitement. That had all started about an hour ago. He knew that if he didn't make a move soon Luka would come and get him like a naughty child. It was now or never.

These were uniformly good looking people with the exception perhaps of the two elderly people who smelt a little odd even to Ivica. There are times when being a stranger in a strange land is an immeasurable advantage. His apparent, and entirely specious, lack of understanding of social _morés_ was not only tolerated but indulged, people answering his slightly too personal questions readily.

He knew Carter without being told who he was. Well turned out, clean shaven, good looking, at ease. As the professors Backhaus moved away he slid into their place and held out his hand, back straight.

"Oh, er … hi", Carter said. "You must be – "

"Ivica Kovac." He tightened his hold on Carter's hand and watched as he tried not to wince. He toyed with and rejected the idea of clicking his heels.

"John Carter. I - "

"I know."

"You do?"

"I know a lot about . . . a lot."

Carter blinked. "Okay."

"You work with Luka."

"Yes."

"And Abby."

"Yes. We've, er, known each other for, oh well, for a long time."

"Known each other."

"Yes."

"Like in Bible."

"What?"

"And Joseph took his wife but he knew her not. King James version. My father got it from a German soldier who got it from an English soldier who . . . well, never mind. I learned Christmas Story by heart. No idea what it meant until later. " He laughed shortly. "Knew her not."

"Oh, yes, I see, you mean . . . well, yes, for a while, we dated for … a while." Ivica's gaze had drifted over his shoulder; Carter turned and followed his gaze to where Jing-Mei was talking to Luka. "My fiancée. I could introduce – "

"This is the fiancée you chose."

"Yes."

Carter felt suddenly uncomfortable. Ivica was looking at him right in the eye now, eyes narrowed very slightly. "Good decision" he said quietly. "Excellent decision". He glanced down at Carter's feet, raised his eyebrows at the none too clean trainers and shook his head. So much for that theory – or perhaps it was the carelessness of wealth. "Pleasure to talk to you Dr. Carter." He began to walk away but then turned back; Carter raised his eyebrows expectantly. "Nice shoes" Ivica said and left him.

oOo

"He looks like he has a stick up his ass." Ivica gave Luka no preamble.

"No, he's alright, comes from money."

"Hmmm rich. . . fiancée's pretty though."

"Yes she is, but he's a good guy"

"She rich too?"

"I don't know. Why don't you ask her?"

"He and Abby . . . " he waved a hand non comittedly in the air.

"Why do you ask?"

"Something Maggie said."

"What did Maggie say?"

"That Abby could have married a millionaire. He's a millionaire and he told me they . . . dated. Unless she knows any other millionaires of course. Maybe she could spare one for Anna." Luka didn't reply. "I can't see it. What was she doing with him?"

"You'd have to ask her."

"Fine."

"Don't."

"Why not? Abby and I don't have any secrets."

"You think she's going to discuss her old boyfriends with you?"

"Sure. You'd be surprised what she discusses with me. We're like this." Ivica crossed his fingers by way of demonstration. "Besides, I'll trade her information."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. It depends what she wants to know."

"About you or me?"

"Whatever it takes." Ivica had to admit that his own past might provide more fertile ground for traded secrets than Luka's. Although, he thought, there was always the glove compartment . . .

"You missed your calling."

"What's that?"

"Double agent."

Ivica rocked on his heels a little, looked from Carter to Abby to Jing-Mei.

"She's better off."

"She knows."

"Well she's a wise woman." The smile that Luka gave him vanished as Ivica's palm landed hard between his shoulder blades. "A wise woman." Luka moved before his father could deliver any more congratulatory slaps.

oOo

Ivica was aware that he'd have to be careful about how much he drank. He was bemused by the abstemiousness of the other guests and a little contemptuous of how they picked at the mountain of food spread before them. When did these people just give in to the sheer pleasure of over indulgence he wondered, and he thought of parties at home, real parties.

He watched from a safe distance as Rosa nestled against her mother whilst the guests sang "Happy Birthday" badly, and then attacked the cake placed in front of her with wondering eyes and eager fingers. It was pleasant to see the to and fro between Luka and Abby as cake and frosting was smeared over their faces, but he couldn't help but remember the simple cakes made by his mother and by Elena for Damir and Luka, unsophisticated and crude in comparison to the marvel of smooth icing and symmetry now being demolished. He knew which he preferred.

Earlier he'd wandered outside for a cigarette and had seen the child sized car left there, a huge red bow tied to the front and an outsized card identifying it as being a gift from the millionaire. Excess like this they could handle apparently, but a few drinks gave them the jitters. Strange people.

He consented to have his photograph taken with Rosa who was insufficiently at ease with him to attempt assault with a deadly cake but he was happy to give up his place to Maggie who was altogether more at home with this. He wished they'd all go away now, he wanted to have a sensible conversation with Luka or Abby or even Maggie. He'd never been good at small talk and he'd had enough of behaving himself. As though in answer to the prayer he hadn't uttered Rosa began to whine and the guests took this as their cue to take their leave. Ivica dropped heavily onto the sofa next to Abby in whose lap Rosa was now asleep, and eased his shoes off. He took Abby's hand and kissed it as Luka returned from seeing the elderly couple from next door, laden with left overs, off the premises. Ivica watched as his son gently disentangled the sleeping child from Abby's arms and carried her away to her bed. Maggie was long gone, flushed and looking as dangerously close to meltdown as her granddaughter. It seemed she'd be leaving early in the morning, a long bus ride ahead of her.

From nowhere it came.

"You scared Carter."

"Carter?" He almost hated the name and couldn't have said why if his life depended on it.

"You don't fool me old man."

"He's rich man, huh? So that stick he has up his ass is made of gold." He knew he was challenging her, didn't know why.

"Hey, I don't insult your friends."

"You don't know my friends."

"He's a good guy."

"That's what Luka said."

"And if he can say it . . . "

"Eh, he wouldn't have been right for you."

"I think we both figured that one out." Indeed. And what if they hadn't?

"No regrets? You could be rich woman now."

"I am a rich woman now." He could have kissed her for that.

"Hah, yes, you have the truth there. I'm glad you didn't marry Mr Gold Stick, very glad."

"Stop with the stick thing, OK?"

"OK, I stop. Funny though, eh?" Oh, yes, funny. And done with. " Shame your mother had to go to bed so early."

"She has a very long bus ride ahead of her tomorrow."

"I like her."

"I noticed. I think it's mutual." He struggled with the word and with the edge in her voice., and then the explanation came. "She likes you too."

Jesus, when would they stop with this? Did these people never flirt with one another? Were they not adults? Adults were allowed to get drunk, to smoke, to swear, to flirt, it was the seasoning to life, and he was suddenly indignant, his _amour propre_ offended. "Luka warned me to behave myself, like I'm 17 and she's little virgin."

"I was worried, he saw that."

"Why worried?"

She hesitated, seemed unsure. "Sometimes what would be OK with most people looks like the start of something else with her. It wouldn't be the first time she'd made a fool of herself with a man."

"And now you too! You think I would let her do that? You think I would take . . . " he faltered, tried a word in Croatian.

"Advantage?"

There it was. "Yes, you think that? I don't do that, I never have." He reconsidered. " Well, maybe once. Twice. But with your mother? I'm old but I'm not crazy, I don't shit on my own doorstep."

"Hey, take it easy, it's not – "

But he was into his stride now, his resentment in full force. "And her, what does she do for rest of her life, stay home and watch TV, bake cakes? She has right to her life, to a man in her bed if she needs one." He wanted to tell her about his memories as he'd stood over the piano, wanted to tell her that he missed that, still missed it, still wanted it and that the Mrs Gavrilic's of the world were a pale imitation of it but Jesus, better than nothing, that inside he was still the strong, joyful and ardent young man who had swept Elena off her feet by the sheer force of his passion for her. He was neither a child nor a shrivelled relic and nor was her mother and if the thought of them doing what it seemed you now had to be young and thin and certainly not anyone's parents – and oh, look at the irony of that, the pair of you - to do upset them, well, she and Luka could take their tight arsed, prudish control freakery and shove it where the sun –

"I overreacted, OK? I told her I'm sorry, she's OK with it."

She looked worried and his resentment ebbed a little. He remembered a time when Emilia had gone missing for a week before being returned to Dushan's door by a pork butcher from Sisak for whom she had conceived a passion after he'd given her a lift in his van. The man had seemed terrified, trying with more gentleness than might be expected to prise Emilia's arms from around his neck. She herself screamed that he had lied to her, that he'd said they were coming to get her things. Ivica helped to get her away from him and she hit out before turning to face the wall and sobbing and emptying her bladder at the same time. The man had looked shame faced and apologised to Dushan rather than to Emilia, who was beyond hearing him, saying he was sorry for the trickery but he had to do something, there was a Mrs Pork Butcher at home in Sisak and she was a patient woman but had had enough and the children were starting to get scared, and it was the only way to get Emilia to come to Zagreb at all as he really hadn't wanted to involve the authorities. Behind Dushan the pupil he'd been with stood at the top of the stairs and goggled. Ivica had been in the kitchen, smoking and drinking coffee, waiting for the last pupil of the day to leave so that he could go through the nightly ritual of reassuring Dushan that his wife would be back. And now she was.

Ivica wanted to ask Abby about the times her mother had made a fool of herself with a man, wondered how the scalding humiliation he knew Dushan had felt had been for the child she was then, but she was speaking, and he wondered if she'd seen the questions in his mind.

"You know I think you're just pissed because you didn't get anywhere with her."

"How do you know?"

"What?"

"How far I got?"

"Stop right there old man." She was smiling but she undoubtedly meant it. Well, her house her rules.

"You know this is terrible party, we have no dancing."

"We have no guests."

"So?"Ivica's search through the CD collection led him to a collection of standards and he was thankful that Magdalena had shown him how to use the player at the house in Dubrovnik. He had one himself in Vodice; it was still in the box. Taking Abby's hand he pulled her into his arms and steered her around the room.

"Hey, you're good at this!"

"You're surprised. Thank you so much."

"I just never thought – "

"Elena and I used to dance. Two babies in the house, no money but we had her father's old records and so we danced. She was better than me, of course she was, she had music in her feet as well as her hands". He was quiet for a moment, remembering Duke Ellington, Bobby Darin singing "Beyond The Sea", Edith Piaf. He'd never liked Edith Piaf.

"I wish I could have met her."

He nodded and they danced in silence. He'd thanked God more than once that Elena hadn't been there when Danijela and the children were killed, hadn't been there to see the grief and rage which had convulsed Luka, hadn't been there to see him leave or to wait futilely for him to come back. And if that hadn't happened he would not be here now with Abby as Luka settled Rosa upstairs. It was, as Abby had said before, moot. The song ended and he took her face between his hands and kissed her soundly.

"Can I cut in?"

Neither of them had seen Luka watching. Ivica handed her over to her husband implying that Luka wouldn't have had such an easy time of it if he'd been twenty years younger and not ready for his bed. At the door he turned and watched them dance and smiled as he heard them laugh. He felt a little pain stab at him as he remembered Luka and Danijela like this andfor a terrible moment he resented Abby's happiness before shaking himself. "You stupid old arse" he muttered to himself just loud enough to have Luka look over at him, puzzled. He shook his head and managed a smile. He didn't think either of them noticed when he turned and made his way upstairs.

oOo

Ivica listened intently for a long time, assuring himself that Luka and Abby, if not asleep, were at least engaged in activities which didn't require conversation. He slipped out of bed and pulled on the dressing gown which Tatijana had bought him especially for this trip, because she thought that that the ancient robe he refused to throw out wasn't fit to be seen in polite company. The new one was thick and felt stiff and unwieldy and he missed the soft familiarity of his old one. The sensation of thick carpet under his feet was foreign to him; he was used to old, wobbly floorboards, to rough tiles and to faded rugs. He'd slipped on those rugs more times than he could count and well remembered the sound of dog's claws skittering over the floor and the tangle of legs and ears and tails as they lost their footing. Luka and Damir had listened wide eyed as he told them solemnly that the rug in the farmhouse parlour was magic and that if they weren't good boys it would whisk them away to a place where there was neither cake nor ice cream nor their grandmother's bottled cherries.

Rosa's door stood open half way, the glow of a night light spilling across the landing. He stood in the doorway for a moment before moving to look down at the child. She lay on her back, arms thrown above her head, fingers curled into loose fists, utterly peaceful. There was a chair by the window and he moved it gingerly so that he could sit at her side, his arms resting on the rail of the crib.

Reaching down to her he ran his fingers lightly over her hair. "Rosa" he breathed, "I have five days to get to know you. I won't be here to watch you grow up so you have to tell your parents to bring you to see me. I want you to see the water at home, so clear, the sky . . . I'll paint you in the sunshine by the sea and we'll go and visit your Uncle Damir and Aunt Tatijana and your cousins. We'll stroll down the Stradun and you can throw money into the Onofrio Fountain, only it should be your father's money and not too much because money is money, you know? I don't know about the city walls, the climb doesn't suit my knees any more, but your dad could take you and maybe I can meet you afterwards for a beer. Then maybe next time we could go to Zagreb and you can meet Rade and Drazen and Srjdan. Lazy drunken sots all three of them but good men, good hearts. Well Srjdan not so much maybe and he has a foul mouth on him, but no need to worry about that, I can cover up your ears." His voice never rising above a whisper he told her about his country, her father's country once, the farmhouse, the orchards, about the grandmother she would never meet and finally about the brother and sister whose shadows would always cling to her. "But only to keep you warm, you know? Only to keep you warm."

When Luka went into Rosa's room the next morning, surprised not to have heard her, he found his father still at her bedside, slumped very awkwardly in the chair, chin on his chest. One hand was extended between the bars of the crib, and his forefinger was held securely in the little girl's hand. They were both sound asleep.

Luka left them that way.

END


End file.
